Meadow grasshopper
| Meadow grasshopper | ||||||||||||
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Meadow grasshopper ( Chorthippus dorsatus ), ♀️ |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Chorthippus dorsatus | ||||||||||||
| ( Zetterstedt , 1821) |
The meadow grasshopper ( Chorthippus dorsatus ) is a short-antennae insect from the family of field locusts (Acrididae).
features
The animals are 14 to 18 millimeters (males) or 19 to 25 millimeters (females) long. Their body is brown or olive green in color. More rarely, the back is partly grass-green, the abdomen end of the males is often red. The thorax is often covered with hair. The side keels of the pronotum run parallel in the first third, but at the back they diverge clearly in an arc shape, but are never kinked. The female costal field is densely veined and much wider than that of the white- rimmed grasshopper ( Chorthippus albomarginatus ).
Occurrence
The species occurs in Europe and Asia and is common in Central Europe everywhere. In Europe, the northern distribution area extends over Brittany , Luxembourg , the south-east of the Netherlands , Denmark and the south-east of Sweden . The species is absent from the British Isles . The southern distribution includes Spain , southern Italy , Slovenia and southern Bulgaria . The species occurs to the east as far as the Amur region and northeast China . The species lives in Central Europe mostly at altitudes between 500 and 800 meters, in Switzerland it rises to 1800, in Bulgaria also over 2200 meters. Slightly moist to moist meadows are preferred to be colonized, especially around bogs , but the species also occurs on moderately dry meadows. Meadows that are heavily used for agriculture or fertilized are avoided.
Way of life
The meadow grasshopper eats herbivores of different grasses. The females lay their eggs on or between blades of grass or in the vegetation just above the ground. The larvae hatch in late May to early June and go through four larval stages until the adult insect, which occurs from mid-July to mid-October.
Courtship and mating
The mating song of the males can only be heard a few meters away by humans and consists of short verses which, like the very similar sounding common grasshopper ( Chorthippus parallelus ), consist of scratchy syllables, but a whirring sound is added to them. Overall, a verse lasts one to one and a half seconds, but the singing, during which the intensity and speed of the individual verses vary, usually lasts for many minutes. At the end of a successful courtship, the male makes a start-up sound and then jumps towards the female. If the male hears a competitor during courtship, the whirring sound added at the end of the stanza is made stronger and longer. Occasionally, mismatches occur between the meadow and common grasshopper.
swell
literature
- Heiko Bellmann : Der Kosmos Heuschreckenführer, The species of Central Europe safely determine , Franckh-Kosmos Verlag GmbH & Co KG, Stuttgart 2006, ISBN 3-440-10447-8 .
- Peter Detzel: The locusts of Baden-Württemberg. Verlag Eugen Ulmer GmbH & Co, Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-8001-3507-8 .
