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 & environment

Bramble thickets, hedges, tall grassland and field margins

Sources consulted: Ragge y Reynolds, The Songs of the Grasshoppers and Crickets of Western Europe; Buglife; Fauna Ibérica

Best time: From July to October, singing from bushes at dusk