''Podisma pedestris'' is a species of 'short-horned

grasshopper Grasshoppers are a group of insects belonging to the suborder Caelifera. They are amongst what are possibly the most ancient living groups of chewing herbivorous insects, dating back to the early Triassic around 250 million years ago. Grassh ...

s' belonging to the family

Acrididae Acrididae are the predominant family of grasshoppers, comprising some 10,000 of the 11,000 species of the entire suborder Caelifera. The Acrididae are best known because all locusts (swarming grasshoppers) are of the Acrididae. The subfamily Oedi ...

subfamily

Melanoplinae The Melanoplinae are a subfamily of grasshoppers in the family Acrididae. They are distributed across the Holarctic and Neotropical realms. They are one of the two largest subfamilies in the Acrididae. As of 2001 the Melanoplinae contained over 8 ...

Distribution

This small wingless grasshopper is found throughout most of

Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

and the eastern

Palearctic realm The Palearctic or Palaearctic is a biogeographic realm of the Earth, the largest of eight. Confined almost entirely to the Eastern Hemisphere, it stretches across Europe and Asia, north of the foothills of the Himalayas, and North Africa. The ...

, extending to temperate mainland east Asia.Orthoptera Species File (Version 5.0/5.0; retrieved 7 June 2021)
/ref>

Description

The adult males grow up to long, while the females reach of length. They can be encountered from mid June through October in dry meadows, in rocky slopes of mountains, alpine pastures and forest clearings. They feed on grasses and herbaceous plants. The females lay their eggs on the ground. Heuschrecke Mullitztal

The basic coloration of the body varies from dark-brownish to yellowish, with black and yellow trasversal stripes on the sides of the abdomen. The males have brighter and more intense colours and more extensive black markings than the females. A dark longitudinal stripe runs from the eye to

pronotum The prothorax is the foremost of the three segments in the thorax of an insect, and bears the first pair of legs. Its principal sclerites (exoskeletal plates) are the pronotum (dorsal), the prosternum (ventral), and the propleuron (lateral) on e ...

. The

femora The femur (; : femurs or femora ), or thigh bone is the only bone in the thigh — the region of the lower limb between the hip and the knee. In many four-legged animals the femur is the upper bone of the hindleg. The top of the femur fits in ...

of the hind legs are reddish, while

tibiae The tibia (; : tibiae or tibias), also known as the shinbone or shankbone, is the larger, stronger, and anterior (frontal) of the two bones in the leg below the knee in vertebrates (the other being the fibula, behind and to the outside of the t ...

are bluish with white spines. In both sexes the vestigial wings are oval, very short and unfit to flight (

brachyptery Brachyptery is an anatomical condition in which an animal has very reduced wings. Such animals or their wings may be described as "brachypterous". Another descriptor for very small wings is microptery. Brachypterous wings generally are not functi ...

), resembling those of a nymph. This species sometimes has well-developed wings, enabling to fly.

Subspecies

* ''Podisma pedestris'' var. ''caprai'' Salfi, 1935 * ''Podisma pedestris'' var. ''nadigi'' Harz, 1975 * ''Podisma pedestris'' var. ''pedestris'' (

Linnaeus Carl Linnaeus (23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné,#Blunt, Blunt (2004), p. 171. was a Swedish biologist and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming o ...

1758 Events January–March * January 1 – Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus (Carl von Linné) publishes in Stockholm the first volume (''Animalia'') of the 10th edition of ''Systema Naturae'', the starting point of modern zoologic ...

) * ''Podisma pedestris'' var. ''sviridenkoi'' Dovnar-Zapolskii, 1927

References

External links

Fauna Europaea

Biolib

* {{Taxonbar, from=Q1520903 Melanoplinae Grasshoppers described in 1758 Orthoptera of Europe Orthoptera of Asia Taxa named by Carl Linnaeus