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The glass katydid
If you’re a photographer, insect aficionado, or both, you should be checking Harvard biologist Piotr Naskrecki’s website The Smaller Majority. There you’ll find some of the most amazing animals in the world, all photographed with loving care.
The latest oddity is the glass katydid (Phlugis teres, described in 1773) from the Neotropics. As it ages it changes from completely transparent to green. As Piotr notes:
I coined the name Glasss katydid after seeing for the first time young nymphs of Phlugis teres, a species found in Suriname, who display remarkable, nearly complete transparency of their bodies. These minute insects truly look as if they were made of glass and, peering closely, it is possible to see most of their internal organs, including the entire tracheal system. Unfortunately, these katydids lose most of the transparency as they get older, and eventually acquire pale green coloration, occasionally marked with brown accents.
Contents
The nymph sitting on Piotr’s finger (all photos copyright by Naskrecki and used with permission):
It’s not clear (pardon the pun) whether this change in transparency is a direct adaptation or simply a byproduct of something else. I’m not aware of other insects that do this (correct me if I’m wrong), although perhaps in this species the nymphs live in places different from adults. The green-ness of the adults, pervasive in katydids, probably hides them from both predators and prey.
More on this species from Naskrecki:
Glass katydids are sit-and-wait predators who spend most of the day sitting upside down on the underside of large, thin leaves, usually at the edge of the rainforest or in open, shrubby habitats. They prefer leaves that are fully exposed to the sun so that any insect landing on its upper surface will cast a dark, sharply defined shadow. And that shadow is what Glass katydids are waiting for – it tells them whether the insect is a hard beetle (not good) or a soft fly (excellent), and if the insect looks like a good meal they launch themselves from under the leaf and onto its surface, and capture the victim with their long, very spiny legs in a blink of an eye.
Check out the spines:
The species is notable for one other thing: its high-pitched sound:
In addition to being some of the most sophisticated and fastest orthopteran predators, Glass katydids are famous for the sound they produce – their call exceeds the frequency of 55 kHz, which is about three times the frequency a human ear is capable of hearing. A closely related genus Archnoscelis holds the record of producing the highest frequency call among all invertebrates – a whopping 129 kHz, twice the frequency of echolocation of most bats, and about 10 times more than the hearing ability of most adult humans. Another reminder that the ability to look cool and do amazing things seems to be inversely correlated with the body size.
Piotr has discovered a new and yet unnamed species of katydid in Mozambique, which he’ll post about soon. He gives a photo of another new and unnamed species from Costa Rica:
Katydids, by the way, are in the order Orthoptera, along with grasshoppers, locusts, and crickets, but, within that group, they’re members of the family Tettigoniidae. It would do you good to look over the orders of insects. Some you’ll know already, but you might pick up a few other names. There will be a pop quiz.
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