Eight thousand leaf-mimics formerly called long-horned grasshoppers
Tettigoniidae—katydids or bush crickets—are the sole living family in their ensiferan superfamily, with more than eight thousand species. Many sing at night in leaf camouflage; sizes span a tiny five millimetres in harsh habitats to giants near 130 millimetres.
Linnaeus described the type genus Tettigonia’s great green bush cricket in 1758; the Latin name nods to small cicada-like insects from Greek tettigónion. Tropical forests hold most diversity—the Amazon alone hosts over two thousand species—yet cool temperate zones and even arid scrub still shelter them on every continent except Antarctica. Smaller bodies correlate with faster development and leaner diets in stressful climates.
Eggs are typically oval, glued in rows when ovipositors allow; the blade-like egg-layer’s shape dictates where clutches sit. Modern fossils are no older than the Cenozoic: Arctolocusta from Paleocene Greenland around sixty-one million years ago and early Eocene Pseudotettigonia from Denmark’s Fur Formation rank among the oldest. Several extinct subfamilies fill North American and European amber and rock.
Taxonomy keeps shuffling tribes—Copiphorinae now a tribe inside Conocephalinae—but the acoustic identity remains: strident nocturnal advertisements from insects that look like walking foliage. Calling them long-horned grasshoppers muddles them with caeliferans; their antennae and songs mark a different orthopteran strategy.
Ovipositors that look like swords are precision tools for sliding eggs into stems or soil, linking morphology to microhabitat. Leaf mimicry can be so complete that photographers focus on “foliage” that suddenly walks. Nocturnal choruses structure tropical nights the way birdsong structures dawn, each species staking bandwidth. From five-millimetre desert waifs to hand-sized giants, bush crickets prove that “grasshopper” was always too blunt a word for ensiferan diversity.
Source: Tettigoniidae
