Memorial Day Mediterranean Katydids

Summer time is almost here and we have rediscovered the introduced Mediterranean Katydid (Phaneroptera nana) that we last encountered in 2014! Now that the hatching season has arrived, nymphs are now once again abundant here in Albany, CA.

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Today (Memorial Day) the Albany Middle School campus was relatively empty and devoid of the normal sports activities, and as we did not have to go to school today, we decided to take our chance to forage for Anise Swallowtail (Papilio zelicaon) eggs and caterpillars around 11 AM.

As Albany Middle School alumni, we were extremely familiar with the campus setting. Like most school campuses, the Albany Middle School campus contains areas that field guides and ecologists categorize as "disturbed areas" -- open areas where plant matter and topsoil has been cleared away for urbanization purposes. These disturbed areas create an ideal environment for the opportunistic and invasive Wild Fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) that has seized Northern California in recent years. Needless to say, the perimeter of the school's parking lot and track field was a clear victim of F. vulgare. ​

After briefly foraging for P. zelicaon, we collected a single second instar caterpillar and were disappointed to conclude that despite the prescence of the fennel, a school was probably not the ideal setting for potential egg-laying butterflies. We collected the caterpillar at the far end of the track field where there is a large fence separating the school campus from the adjacent resident homes. Behind the fence (not available for our access as it is someone's private property), there is a Purple Morning Glory vine (Ipomoea purpurea) that creeps all along through the fence to the side facing the school campus. Because the fence was located across the track, it receives full and direct sunlight -- a now rare occurrence due to the high density of man-made barriers such as buildings. This was especially true at this time as it was nearing noon.

Almost two years ago during the mid-summer of 2014 -- the last year we reared P. nana -- we had found our two katydids on this morning glory vine. But because we graduated from Albany Middle School in 2013, we rarely had a chance to visit the school since then. By the time we arrived on the scene today, we were skeptical about finding any because the morning glory appeared much less robust than we remembered.

​But to our surprise, a quick glance yielded not one, but two Mediterranean Katydid nymphs! While we are not entirely certain, we believe the first one was at least a third instar nymph while the other was second instar. ​​After searching for almost an hour, we found another nymph which we are almost certain was a newborn (not shown). We concluded that we had arrived just in time for their hatching season (seems to be slightly later than the native Mexican Bush Katydid). ​

We were able to collect two more young nymphs when we came back to look again this afternoon. We found one more around 6 PM in front of our home sitting on a fennel flower stock in our front yard.

We were very surprised to have found the P. nana to be so abundant as we normally only encounter Scudderia Mexicana. This year it seems to be the opposite in that we have found very few Mexican Katydids but a total of six Mediterranean Katydids in a single day! This lead us to wonder whether the nonnative species was beginning to out-compete the native species since just a few weeks ago we had also found a Mexican Katydid nymph on the same fennel plant -- a strong indicator that they may share a very similar ecological niche despite the fact, as we noted before, P. nana may hatch later. 

But at the same time, when upon close investigation of our Mediterranean Katydids, it appears that we may have encountered the species more frequently that we had previously thought. In 2009 (before we began photographic documentation), we found a handful of katydids on a different morning glory near Albany Middle School that we assumed were S. mexicana. However, we later noted that they appeared to be much more green in color and smaller in size than our other katydids that we had confirmed were S. mexicana which matches a description of P. nana. ​

In any case, we are hoping to finally be able to breed our newly-caught Mediterranean Katydids this year and if we succeed perhaps they will one day be available for purchase in our store!

Scudderia mexicana

- Brian