More Morning Glory Mediterraneans!

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Though summer is not officially here, summer vacation has begun this week for students of the Albany School District and it seems the Mediterranean Katydids (Phaneroptera nana) have responded with as much enthusiasm as we have! In this post, we discuss more P. nana discovered in Albany, CA and their peculiar aggregating behavior.

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Since we first re-encountered the Mediterranean Katydid from 2014 this year on Memorial Day (5/30) we have been actively pursuing the species so as to add more individuals into our collection in hopes of eventually being able to successfully breed them. Because we had discovered a newborn katydid and several other very young nymphs on our first excursion to Albany Middle School, we figured the time was just right and the hatching season had begun.

On the morning of the following Saturday (6/4) after we collected our first six katydids, we headed back to the old Middle School in hopes of finding new hatchlings. Unfortunately, this was not the best decision because we did not have the luxury of it being a national holiday and there were numerous sports activities taking place at the site of our first catch. Nevertheless (while carefully avoiding a legion of young softball players and their parents) we were able to add one new member to our collection, discovered at the far right end of the fence. We believe it was a second instar nymph. ​

With our hopes high, we of course decided to come back to look for P. nana yet again this Sunday (6/12) now that we had officially gotten off for summer vacation. This time, heading out at around 10 AM with the sun shining very brightly (though according to weather.com, it was a mild 65 degrees), we once again searched the Purple Morning Glory (Ipomoea purpurea) starting from the right end of the fence where we seemed to have found the majority of them before. Immediately, we were able to find two more second instar nymphs not far from each other, the first of which had very recently molted (it's exoskeleton had clearly not hardened yet because the antennae were almost white and not the normal black color). 

Then, as we slowly made our way leftwards shortly after finding the first two katydids, we were astounded to find two more identically sized nymphs sitting less than a centimeter apart from each other. They appeared to be about the same size as the nymphs that we collected on previous trips and notably larger than the two second instars. What so intrigued us was that, although it may have been a coincidence, for the third time since encountering P. nana this year we had observed similarly aged nymphs that banded together in pairs. The first time was during our first encounter on Memorial day, and now twice more this had been the case.

We observed this pattern yet again when we found the last two nymphs, making a total three katydid "duos" or six individuals collected that day. Like before, just moments after spotting the a first katydid, we discovered another katydid of the same size very close by. However, these two were neither second instar nor of the same size as the previous duo and must have been of some instar between the two.

With the odd occurrence of having found so many of our P. nana in pairs, we were beginning to think that perhaps P. nana is somehow mildly gregarious, which would truly be strange indeed. In some Orthoptera such as locusts or short-horned grasshoppers, a gregarious hormonal state induces swarming, but this is entirely different that what we had observed. In addition, we were unable to easily track any sociable behavior or any affinity between individuals in our captive enclosure at home due to the fact that there is not enough space to disperse them properly. ​​

- Brian