''Euthystira brachyptera'', the Small Gold Grasshopper, is a species of
grasshopper
Grasshoppers are a group of insects belonging to the suborder Caelifera. They are among what is possibly the most ancient living group of chewing herbivorous insects, dating back to the early Triassic around 250 million years ago.
Grasshopp ...
belonging to the family
Acrididae
The AcrididaeMacLeay WS (1821) ''Horae Entomologicae or Essays on the Annulose Animals'' 2 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 bec ...
.
Subspecies
* ''Euthystira brachyptera brachyptera'' (Ocskay, 1826)
* ''Euthystira brachyptera intermedia'' (Bolivar, I., 1897)
Description
''Euthystira brachyptera'' can reach a length of . The body color is shiny yellow-green. The wings of the males reach the center of the abdomen, while the wings of the females are very small and usually purplish. This species could be confused with ''
Euchorthippus declivus'' and ''
Chrysochraon dispar''. It can be distinguished by means of the sharper top of head and the proportionally smaller eyes. Adults can be found from July to September.
[Pyrgus.de]
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Distribution and habitat
This species is present in most of Europe, in the eastern Palearctic realm
The Palearctic or Palaearctic is the largest of the eight biogeographic realms of the Earth. It stretches across all of Eurasia north of the foothills of the Himalayas, and North Africa.
The realm consists of several bioregions: the Euro-Sibe ...
, and in the Near East
The ''Near East''; he, המזרח הקרוב; arc, ܕܢܚܐ ܩܪܒ; fa, خاور نزدیک, Xāvar-e nazdik; tr, Yakın Doğu is a geographical term which roughly encompasses a transcontinental region in Western Asia, that was once the hist ...
.Fauna Europaea
/ref> It prefers mountain and subalpine meadows with tall grasses, heaths with rough vegetation and woodland clearings. It is quite common in calcareous grasslands with ''Brachypodium pinnatum
''Brachypodium pinnatum'', the heath false brome or tor-grass, is a species of grass with a widespread distribution in temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere. It typically grows in calcareous grassland, and reaches tall. The flowerhead is ...
''.[Jeffrey Lockwood,Alexandre Latchininsky,Mikhail Georgievich Sergee]
Grasshoppers and Grassland Health
/ref>[
]
References
Gomphocerinae
Orthoptera of Europe
Taxa named by Franz Ocskay
{{gomphocerinae-stub