Great Green Bush Cricket

• Its ears are on the tibiae of the front legs, in the form of two slits leading to tympanic membranes.
• Despite looking like a peaceable herbivore, it hunts caterpillars, flies and other insects, and can bite hard if held.
• The female carries a long, sabre-shaped ovipositor with which she inserts the eggs into the soil, and which is often mistaken for a sting.
• It is not a grasshopper but a long-horned relative, a tettigoniid, and those extremely fine antennae longer than the body are the trait that separates it from the true grasshoppers.
• It hears through its legs: its tympanal organs are on the front tibiae, not on the abdomen as in grasshoppers.
• The male sings by rubbing his forewings together, with a file and a scraper, and his stridulation is a continuous, penetrating buzz that can be heard more than a hundred metres away on summer nights.
• It is omnivorous and above all predatory: it hunts caterpillars, flies and other insects, and bites hard if handled.
• The female has a long, curved, sabre-shaped ovipositor with which she inserts her eggs into the soil; it is not a sting and she does not sting.
• Its eggs can spend more than one winter in diapause before hatching.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (insect)

Habitat and environment

Bramble thickets, hedges, tall grassland and field margins

Size at birth

The nymph resembles the adult but without developed wings; after each moult it eats its own cast skin

Gestation / incubation

The female lays in the soil in autumn and the eggs enter diapause; they usually hatch in April after one winter, but the diapause can go on for another one or two years. The nymphs go through 5-7 instars in one or two months

Litter / clutch size

Up to 600 eggs per female, laid one by one by driving a sabre-shaped ovipositor of 23 to 32 mm into the soil

Sources consulted: Ragge y Reynolds, The Songs of the Grasshoppers and Crickets of Western Europe · Buglife · Fauna Ibérica · EBSCO Research Starters, ficha Great green bush cricket · recopilacion de biologia · Recopilacion de biologia de Tettigonia viridissima · Insect Week · Ficha de especie de Tettigonia viridissima · Animalia · Orthoptera & Allied Insects

Best time: Nymphs from April, adults from late June until October; it sings from late afternoon and through the night, with a piercing sound that carries a long way