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The true colours of the Formidable Pygmy Grasshopper (Notocerus formidabilis Gunther, 1974) from the Sava region (Madagascar).

ABSTRACT: The Formidable Pygmy Grasshopper, Notocerus formidabilis Günther, 1974 (Tetrigidae: 'Malagasy Metrodorinae'), is certainly a stunning, extraordinary insect. Despite the fact that the species was described almost 50 years ago, its beauty had remained completely hidden until recently. The bright yellow colouration of the minute warts on its dorsal hump and even brighter purple-yellowish colouration of its abdomen have been, tragically, completely lost in museum specimens. Luckily, photographs of three live females taken in 2007, 2009 and 2015 were recently uploaded to the iNaturalist platform by the first author of this paper, where they were identified as N. formidabilis by the middle and last authors. Along with a male and a female discovered in the MNHN collections (Paris) and the holotype female, these are the only records of the species. All six records are presented and depicted in the present study, and the variation of the species is discussed for the first time. This rare species seems to be endemic to NE Madagascar, a region of truly wonderful diversity.

SUBMITTER: Mathieu E

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8203595 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Colour-marking polymorphism is widely distributed among cryptic species. To account for the adaptive significance of such polymorphisms, several hypotheses have been proposed to date. Although these hypotheses argue over the degree of camouflage effects of marking morphs (and the interactions between morphs and their microhabitat backgrounds), as far as we know, most empirical evidence has been provided under unnatural conditions (i.e., using artificial prey).Tetrix japonica, a pygmy grasshopper, is highly polymorphic in colour-markings and occurs in both sand and grass microhabitats. Even within a microhabitat, T. japonica is highly polymorphic. Using humans as dummy predators and printed photographs in which various morphs of grasshoppers were placed against different backgrounds, we addressed three questions to test the neutral, background heterogeneity, and differential crypsis hypotheses in four marking-type morphs: 1) do the morphs differ in the degree of crypsis in each microhabitat, 2) are different morphs most cryptic in specific backgrounds of the microhabitats, and 3) does the morph frequency reflect the degree of crypsis?The degree of camouflage differed among the four morphs; therefore, the neutral hypothesis was rejected. Furthermore, the order of camouflage advantage among morphs differed depending on the two types of backgrounds (sand and grass), although the grass background consistently provided greater camouflage effects. Thus, based on our results, we could not reject the background heterogeneity hypothesis. Under field conditions, the more cryptic morphs comprised a minority of the population. Overall, our results demonstrate that the different morphs were not equivalent in the degree of crypsis, but the degree of camouflage of the morphs was not consistent with the morph frequency. These findings suggest that trade-offs exist between the camouflage benefit of body colouration and other fitness components, providing a better understanding of the adaptive significance of colour-markings and presumably supporting the differential crypsis hypothesis.

Dataset Information

The true colours of the Formidable Pygmy Grasshopper (Notocerus formidabilis Gunther, 1974) from the Sava region (Madagascar).

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