The Songs of the Grasshoppers and Crickets of Western Europe

Abstract

My own eldest daughter was saying that as a child she thought all families went to the continent of Europe collecting grasshoppers and bush-crickets and if you believe the senior author this was clearly the same for his family. Small children have such sharp ears and their eyes are so near the ground that they make wonderful assistants; this was the norm not the exception. At our age (early sixties) insect songs bring home the lowered sensitivity of human ears and the value of grandchildren! This book represents a lifetime of what he calls (Ephonotaxonomy. With the market for fairly cheap portable recording equipment having created instruments of sufficient quality, calling song can now be recorded, and indeed should be recorded, when taxonomic studies are made. Morphological studies have also improved including those of the male genitalia and stridulatory files where appropriate (especially in Grylloidea, Tettigonioidea and Acridoidea/Gomphocerinae). Compare the simplicity of approach by Dirsh,1956a in which an entire monograph on African catantopini was published without mention of the male internal genitalia (Dirsh, 1956b in the same year publishing a paper on the value of the male genitalia in acridoidea in relation to taxonomy) with that by Otte and Alexander, 1983 in which Australian Crickets are identified using an enlarged suite of characters including sonograms. This sort of detail is now accepted. Ragge and Reynold's book is a good quality reference work with masses of information, but under no circumstances can it be taken as light bedside reading. The complexity in song revealed (an inevitable result of technical advance of our taxonomic procedures) and the fact that we now have means of studying fine (Edialects'within taxa, is an immense step forwards. Ragge and Reynolds lay all the basics for a mass of new research making the question of orthopteroid songs far less daunting for their readers.