Monday 14 October 2013

Heteropternis thoracica (Walker, 1870)

For those who have seen Silence of the Lambs: if Buffalo Bill had stuffed grasshoppers down his victim's throats instead of moths, I have to suspect that it would have been these.

Heteropternis thoracica, CHongwe, Lusaka, Zambia
Male. Photographed in March 2011, in Chongwe, Lusaka, Zambia, using Olympus E-420, Zuiko 40-150mm lens and 3 KOOD magnifiers.

That's not a judgement on today's featured creature, a perfectly harmless - and herbivorous - grasshopper, but a note on the similarity of the thoracic markings for some males of this species and the Potato Hawk-Moth (Acherontia atropos - an as yet unfeatured European species) used by the character: the symmetrical pale markings on a dark background can, with a little more imagination required for the grasshopper, look rather skull-like.

In the case of this individual, quite a lot of imagination would be required.

Same individual, different angle.

 As with most African grasshoppers that don't form biblical swarms, there's not a huge amount known about this species. Quite possibly poisonous, as it shows off a bright-red abdomen in flight, but this is purely conjecture on my part. What we do know, or at least strongly suspect, is that it is:

Heteropternis thoracica
(Walker, 1870)

Which, as you may suspect, belongs to:

- Ailopini     
- Oedipodinae
See also Humbe tenuicornis.
- Acrididae       
 - Acridoidea       
- Acrididea            
- Caelifera               
- Orthoptera              
 - Panorthopera            
- Orthopterida               
- Polyorthoptera             
- Anartioptera                   
- Polyneoptera                   
See also Sibylla.
- Neoptera                             
- Manopterygota                        
 - Pterygota                                    
- Dicondylia                                    
- Insecta                                            
- Hexapoda                                         
- Arthropoda                                         
- Ecdysozoa                                             
 - Protostomia                                             
- Nephrozoa                                                 
- Bilateralia                                                      
- Eumetazoa                                                       
- Animalia                                                              
- Eukaryota                                                                 

And that, folks, is all.

For now.



The orthoptera speciesfile is, as always, the best resource around for identifying African grasshoppers, although it must be noted that its usefulness is greatly increased by a rapid connection. Trawling through species distributions and descriptions with a dial-up connection would be extremely time-consuming and probably more expensive than purchasing the original papers in which regionally-appropriate species were described.

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