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Loud South African grasshopper may tell us something about evolution

If you think crickets seem loud on a still summer night, you’ve probably never heard bladder grasshoppers.

And that would be understandable, since they’re indigenous to Africa—particularly South Africa—and have no relatives closer than California and Mexico.

But the grasshoppers’ sounds have become familiar to Moira van Staaden, biological sciences. She has studied the peculiar insects for nearly nine years, including the last two and a half with National Science Foundation funding, collecting them in her native South Africa to look for answers to questions about the interaction among their physiology, behavior and evolution.

“They clearly can do things they shouldn’t be able to do” considering their size, says van Staaden about the grasshoppers, which date from the Jurassic period.

For one, they make a lot of noise—almost 100 decibels if measured one meter away, compared to about 75 decibels produced by the familiar cricket. “It’s pretty loud,” she says, explaining that the relative racket results from the physical feature that puts the “bladder” in the grasshoppers’ name.

Not only is it loud, but it’s also low-pitched and can be heard two kilometers (more than one mile) away, according to van Staaden. “There’s no other insect that can transmit an acoustic signal that far,” she says, noting that it flies in the face of the general rule of smaller beings—humans as well as insects—emitting higher-pitched sounds at lower-intensity frequencies.

Van Staaden was introduced to them more than 20 years ago as an undergraduate at the University of Natal in South Africa. Asked in a laboratory exercise to locate the grasshoppers’ ears, she couldn’t. Rather than having to find only two ears, as most insects have, she learned that she was looking for 12, one pair for each abdominal segment.

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