Great Green Bush-Cricket

Fascinating facts about the Great Green Bush-Cricket

• A cricket the size of your thumb produces a sound at 120 decibels — louder than a rock concert, loud enough to cause hearing damage to the human ear. The great green bush-cricket generates this noise by rubbing its wings together up to 150 times per second, and males sing through the night during summer to attract females from over a kilometre away. Their song is so intense that some females go partially deaf during mating season, a trade-off evolution made them accept.
• These insects have ears on their shins. Instead of eardrums on their heads, great green bush-crickets detect sound through a pair of oval membranes on their front legs below the knee — the same location where humans have shin bone. This placement lets them pinpoint exactly which direction a male's call is coming from, a critical skill when navigating dark grasslands at night.
• A female's ovipositor is a sword longer than her entire body, and she uses it to slice into plant stems and bury hundreds of eggs inside like a living syringe. The blade is serrated like a miniature saw and can penetrate bark and woody tissue. She'll spend weeks inserting eggs one by one, each positioned deep enough to survive winter and hatch the following spring.
• They hunt at night with vision sharper than most mammals in near-total darkness, guided by eyes that bulge outward and capture light from nearly every angle around their heads. During the day they vanish into vegetation — their neon green bodies are invisible against leaves, a camouflage so perfect that scientists sometimes fail to spot them in photographs of their own habitat until they look three times.
• In just 60 to 90 days, a great green bush-cricket transforms from a pinhead-sized nymph to a full-sized adult while shedding its exoskeleton five times, each time discarding a paper-thin shell identical to itself. After the final moult in late summer, adults have one job: find a mate, reproduce, and die before the first frost — their entire adult lifespan is just four months, yet they'll lay enough eggs in that window to populate a meadow for the next year.

At a glance

About the Great Green Bush-Cricket

In the warm, languid evenings of summer, the Great Green Bush-Cricket emerges as a vibrant, emerald presence, its delicate wings a blur as it flits through the underbrush with an air of quiet confidence. With each powerful leap, it propels itself forward, a master of stealth and agility, its bright green carapace blending seamlessly into the surrounding foliage as it navigates the intricate web of stems and leaves. As it sings its sweet, melodious song, the bush-cricket's very existence seems to embody the carefree, sun-kissed spirit of the natural world.

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