What Katy-did('nt) know

..is that it is a confusing insect. I don't think that the insect itself has got any identity crisis, but if you look it up on internet it can be referred to as long-horned grasshopper or bushcricket, yeah, that makes sense! Why refer to other orthoptera superfamilies when they have got their own name? There are about 25.000 species in the orthopetra order and the taxonomy has been very disorganized and inconsistent to say the least..well, until recently when scientists in Texas untied the knots of the tangled caos by analysing the entire mitochondrial genome of 254 different taxa and reconstruct the phylogeny.
Let's try and sum up: Orthoptera originated 350-300 million years ago from a lineage it shared with the mantis and then diverged into two suborders Enisfera (crickets and Katydids and relatives) and Caelifera (grasshoppers, locust and relatives) 300-250 million years ago (so calling a katydid grasshopper is at best a 250million year old error). The crickets then diverged from other Enisfera around 250-200 million years ago. Katydids evolved around 145-65 million years ago, whereas grasshoppers diverged approx 65 million years ago. That means that about the time when the dinosaurs got extinct, katydids, crickets and grasshoppers were all seperate superfamilies that continued to evolve each into their own direction so I think maybe that all of them deserve a proper name. Still I must admit that with 25.000 species of Orthoptera jumping around the world, they are not all easy to tell a part without genetic analysis!

The same researchers have also studied the evolution of acoustic communication in Orthoptera, but I will have to examine that better another time!