Yesterday afternoon, on my way back from the beach, I encountered an interesting rarity in this area ...
... the Saga pedo bush cricket, commonly known as the predatory bush cricket or the spiked magician. The weird second common name relates to the way in which the cricket approaches its prey, with the elevated, slowly waving forelegs - people say that this movement evokes some kind of magician doing some generic abracadabra stuff. I never saw it, so I don't know how exactly that looks.
This is a huge insect, probably the biggest in this area. The body is about 12 centimeters long and the legs are also strong and long, covered with spikes, so it slightly resembles a crab anatomy. I never saw the spiked magician before, so this was a very exciting photo session.
This species can be found in a wide area from the Mediterranean part of Europe, across Western Asia to China, but can't be found easily, it's a rare, endangered species practically everywhere.
While many other bush - crickets supply their vegetarian diet with carcasses and occasionally behave like predators, this is an exclusively predatory species. The spikes on the fore legs and mid-legs help hold the prey firmly.
As you can see on these photographs, the Saga pedo cricket is well camouflaged on the vegetation. They are usually active at night, but can be seen hunting during the day as well, especially at the end of the summer. When hunting, they approach the victim slowly, catching the prey by suddenly leaping on it and grabbing it with long spiny legs.
The cricket was photographed on the Dittrichia viscosa, a plant that grows abundantly in this area and produces a multitude of yellow flowers and attracts tons of insects in early autumn. Autumn looks like second springtime in the dry, seaside places where this plant grows.
I took more photographs, so this interesting, kind of spectacular cricket will appear again in a future post about the Dittrichia viscosa plant. This will be a long, elaborate post with many species and with photographs I collected through the last decade or so ... and will be published some day in winter.
And that's all, with this shot taken while passing by the nearby stone quarry, it's time to end this quick look at the Saga pedo cricket.
As always here on HIVE, the photographs are my work - THE END. The info about the species were found in an old book published in the early 80' called European Fauna, a book I got for one of my early birthdays, some year during the elementary school times.
