Survey of the Orthoptera and Related Orders

Four collecting trips were made to the Park to collect and photograph Orthoptera and related orders. A species of grouse locust (pigmy grasshoppers) was collected at two sites, one in Tennessee and one in North Carolina that had been reported in the literature from only two other locations (a park in Florida and the Bankhead National Forest in Alabama.

This is the only new record for the Park collected this year but additional sites were recorded for other species. We currently recognize about 100 species of Orthoptera and related orders from the Park.

Photographs and scans were made of live and freshly killed specimens for possible inclusion on the DLIA web pages and for a poster summarizing our results. We have photos of most of the Acrididae and some of the crickets, cockroaches, mantids, and walking sticks. The small size of the grouse locusts and many of the crickets makes photography a challenge. Rapidly fading colors in the green katydids almost requires photographing them in the field. This takes away from collecting time.

We feel certain that many additional species are present in the Park that we haven’t found. Future collections will concentrate on finding some of them. Also light trap collection would probably double the known number of roaches and mantids from the Park.