Hurricane Irene paid us a friendly visit last week; by friendly I mean far enough away from us not to do anything other than dump a bit of rain on us and blow a strong breeze. That’s about as close as we like to come to any kind of hurricane, and I’m sure those to our north, who were much more severely affected, will agree.
When you’re lucky enough to be able to enjoy such a far-off brush with a storm, you start to wonder what it might have been able to do for you, rather than to you. These are the kinds of weather event that birders look forward to; storms like this tend to blow both sea and land birds off course, and they can wind up appearing hundreds of miles outside their normal range. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get out to Boynton Inlet or the beach or even the local migrant traps to do any storm birding; nor did I find any windblown strays in my back yard.
By coincidence, though, I did find something new (to me), right in my own back yard, on the day of the storm. It’s a coincidence, because this visitor to my world is certainly no stranger to south Florida. In fact, the entire North American range of this insect species (Turpilia rostrata, Narrow-Beaked Katydid) is the coastal areas of southern Florida where I make my home. You can see this on the map from Singing Insects of North America, hosted by the University of Florida; you should probably politely ignore the creative spelling of the genus name as Turpilla instead of Turpilia:
Katydids, together with grasshoppers and crickets, comprise the hemimetabolous (only three life stages, egg, nymph, adult; compare with holometabolous, four life stages, egg, larva, pupa, adult) insect order Orthoptera. That order, if naming a thing makes it so (or at least if its name is properly descriptive of its taxonomic features), means that its members have straight wings. And indeed, katydids’ wings are straight. According to Marshall, though, taxonomists no longer care about this feature, as it is shared by members of several different orders (Gwynne [2001] lists three of them: Blattodea, the cockroaches, Mantodea, the mantids, and Phantasmodea, the stick insects). Marshall goes on to explain the defining characteristic of the order at present: “the definition of Orthoptera is now narrowed down to a single natural group characterized by fat hind femora and associated saltorial skills” (Marshall 2006, 71).
On the family (or superfamily, depending on your taxonomic allegiance) level, katydids are in the group Tettigoniidae, which name derives from the Greek name for cicadas (which, by the bye, are not members of the Tettigoniidae).
The name confusion continues at what we can euphemistically call the common name, about which there is little common ground: katydids are sometimes called long-horned grasshoppers because they are flattened side to side like grasshoppers, but have very long antennae like crickets (Marshall 2006, 73); the common name for the family is katydid, at least in the New World, New Zealand, and Australia, but in Britain and Europe they are referred to as bush-crickets (Gwynne 2001, 18). It is perhaps only an entomologist’s joke that the family name should be changed to Katydididae (Hubbell 1993).
By whatever name they are known, katydids make their living, most of them, as leaf mimics. They stand stock still in trees and shrubs and people simply can’t see them. They are, in fact, woefully under-represented in specimen collections because of the difficulty of, well, collecting them. The only reason I was able to see this one in my back yard was because she stood out like a sore thumb on my black screened pool fence; she must have been blown out of her leafy cover by the strong breezes from the storm out in the Atlantic.
I found this individual clinging to the pool fence, her left leg much more strongly extended than her right; I surmised that perhaps she had injured it somehow in the breeze, although, as it would turn out, this was not the case; she was just clinging to the fence with one leg bent and one leg straight. Because it was daytime, and katydids are generally nocturnal, she allowed me many opportunities to take her picture, and so I availed myself of them. It’s purely my own fault that none of them are beautiful, although the photos do serve to ID the creature quite nicely.
Here is the beautiful face of Turpilia rostrata:
And here you can see her gorgeous long legs, typical of katydids:
I really appreciated how patient she was in allowing me to take as many different pictures as I felt I needed; it’s not her fault that none of them are very great. Of course, this “patience” on her part is actually her primary defense against predation: katydids are such excellent leaf mimics because remaining motionless and looking like a leaf is a good way to make sure your visually oriented predators (in katydids generally, these include spiders, scorpions, mantids, other katydids(!), birds, lizards, bats, monkeys, Homo sapiens [deep fried or roasted katydid is a delicacy in South America, Africa, China]) don’t find you and eat you.
But, as Gwynne (2001) points out, “Inactivity during daylight is only effective, however, if the potential prey cannot be seen.” As a defensive strategy, a large bright green insect clinging to a pool fence in broad daylight leaves something to be desired. (I apologize for the pun on “leaves”; it truly was unintentional.)
One interesting note about mimicry in katydids: while the adults tend to imitate leaves, the nymphs of several species look remarkably like ants, spiders, or tiger beetles (Gwynne 2001). Same mimetic strategy, just a different object. In fact, these nymphs are diurnal, just like the animals they mimic, until they grow too large for the mimicry to be effective; at that point they change to leaf mimics and move up into the trees and become nocturnal!
My lovely visitor had no way of knowing that by clinging to the black mesh of my pool fence her defense wasn’t working, and I exploited this hole in her defensive strategy as best I could. After she left (overnight activity) and I went over my pictures, I realized that I could have done better (isn’t that always the case?). So I began hoping against hope to see her again. Unfortunately, she is only the second katydid I’ve ever seen in my ten years here in Florida, so this seemed like a completely unreasonable hope.
Sometimes, though, even unreasonable hopes can be fulfilled. A mere two days later I found her riding Eric’s pool noodle around the pool, again out in the open in broad daylight!
I was pretty sure it was the same individual; I mean, what are the odds of my backyard pool being crashed two days apart by two different female katydids? (It’s a real question, not rhetorical. Does anyone know the odds?) This time, though, she was showing the effects of life in the wild: one of her long antennae had broken off, and I fear her time with us is nearly at an end. If you look closely, you can see the mandibles down under the narrow beak that gives her species its common name.
And here is her other side; this shot shows a bit more clearly that her left antenna is now quite a bit shorter than her right one:
Despite her wear, isn’t she a handsome creature?
The genus name, Turpilia, is associated with ugliness, foulness (turpitude), while the specific epithet, rostrata means “beaked.” I can see how some people might find katydids rather fearsome looking, but turpitudinous? Really? That seems a bit much. I think she’s quite beautiful. And Sue Hubbell, describing a fairly common katydid, Pterophylla camellifolia, seems to agree:
They are big, plump, jolly-looking bugs in nursery-bright green, a couple of inches long. Their leaflike wings press tightly against their sides, and their fat [maybe a typo for flat?] bodies are laterally compressed [hmmm, perhaps “fat” was meant earlier], ridged to an apex at their backs so that they look like animated prisms, triangles wrought in three dimensions.
These three-dimensional triangles may not be cuddly, but I, at least, think they’re pretty cute.
References
Gwynne, D. T. 2001. Katydids and Bush-Crickets: Reproductive Behavior and Evolution of the Tettigoniidae. Ithaca: Cornell.
Hubbell, S. 1993. Broadsides from the Other Orders: A Book of Bugs. New York: Random House.
Marshall, S. J. 2006. Insects: Their Natural History and Diversity. Buffalo, NY: Firefly.