''Podisma pedestris'' is a species of 'short-horned grasshoppers' belonging to the family Acrididae subfamily

Melanoplinae The Melanoplinae are a subfamily of grasshoppers in the family Acrididae. They are distributed across the Holarctic and Neotropical realms. They are one of the two largest subfamilies in the Acrididae. As of 2001 the Melanoplinae contained over 8 ...

Distribution

This small wingless grasshopper is present in most of

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

and in 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 ...

through to temperate, mainland east Asia.Orthoptera Species File (Version 5.0/5.0; retrieved 7 June 2021)
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Description

The adult males grow up to long, while the females reach of length. They can be encountered from mid June through October in dry meadows, in rocky slopes of mountains, alpine pastures and forest clearings. They feed on grasses and herbaceous plants. The females lay their eggs on the ground. Heuschrecke Mullitztal

The basic coloration of the body varies from dark-brownish to yellowish, with black and yellow trasversal stripes on the sides of the abdomen. The males have brighter and more intense colours and more extensive black markings than the females. A dark longitudinal stripe runs from the eye to

pronotum The prothorax is the foremost of the three segments in the thorax of an insect, and bears the first pair of legs. Its principal sclerites (exoskeletal plates) are the pronotum ( dorsal), the prosternum (ventral), and the propleuron (lateral) on e ...

. The

femora The femur (; ), or thigh bone, is the proximal bone of the hindlimb in tetrapod vertebrates. The head of the femur articulates with the acetabulum in the pelvic bone forming the hip joint, while the distal part of the femur articulates with t ...

of the hind legs are reddish, while

tibiae The tibia (; ), also known as the shinbone or shankbone, is the larger, stronger, and anterior (frontal) of the two bones in the leg below the knee in vertebrates (the other being the fibula, behind and to the outside of the tibia); it connects ...

are bluish with white spines. In both sexes the vestigial wings are oval, very short and unfit to flight (

brachyptery Brachyptery is an anatomical condition in which an animal has very reduced wings. Such animals or their wings may be described as "brachypterous". Another descriptor for very small wings is microptery. Brachypterous wings generally are not functi ...

), resembling those of a nymph. This species sometimes has well-developed wings, enabling to fly.

Subspecies

* ''Podisma pedestris'' var. ''caprai'' Salfi, 1935 * ''Podisma pedestris'' var. ''nadigi'' Harz, 1975 * ''Podisma pedestris'' var. ''pedestris'' (

Linnaeus Carl Linnaeus (; 23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after his ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné Blunt (2004), p. 171. (), was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the ...

, 1758) * ''Podisma pedestris'' var. ''sviridenkoi'' Dovnar-Zapolskii, 1927

References

External links

Fauna Europaea

Biolib

* {{Taxonbar, from=Q1520903 Acrididae Grasshoppers described in 1758 Orthoptera of Europe Orthoptera of Asia Taxa named by Carl Linnaeus