Songs and morphology in three species of the Chorthippus biguttulus group (Orthoptera, Acrididae, Gomphocerinae) in Russia and adjacent countries

By

Tarasova, Tatiana
Tishechkin, Dmitri
Vedenina, Varja

Type

Article

Date of Publication

2021

Original Publication

ZooKeys

Volume

1073

Pages

21--53

Subjects

calling song , courtship song , Grasshoppers , leg-movement pattern , rivalry song , stridulatory file

Contributed by

Pensoft Publishers

Language

English

Published by

Sofia, Bulgaria Pensoft Publishers

Identifiers

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1073.75539

 

Abstract

Songs and morphology are compared betweenChorthippus miramae(Vorontsovsky, 1928) that was previously named asC. porphyropterusand two other closely related species,C. brunneus(Thunberg, 1815) andC. maritimusMistshenko, 1951. We compare them because the calling song ofC. miramaewas previously shown to have song elements similar to those of other two species. One morphological character, the length of stridulatory file, appeared to be the best character to distinguish between all three species. ForC. maritimusandC. miramae, we present the morphological descriptions since they are absent in the literature. We also establish the synonymyC. maritimus = C. bornhalmiHarz, 1971,syn. n.=C. biguttulus eximiusMistshenko, 1951,syn. n.In the song analysis, we analyse not only the sound but also the leg-movement pattern, which is very helpful to find a homology between various song elements. We show that the calling song ofC. miramaeusually contains two elements, one element being similar to theC. brunneuscalling song, and another – to theC. maritimuscalling song. Despite some similarities, the calling song elements inC. miramaehave some peculiarities. The courtship song ofC. miramaeis similar to theC. brunneussong, whereas the rivalry songs ofC. miramaecomprise both themaritimus-like elements and the unique ones.C. miramaegenerally demonstrates a richer song repertoire than the other two species.