Grasshoppers and Crickets (Orthoptera)
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Glasgow Museums has a collection of approximately 400 grasshopper and cricket specimens (Orthoptera) which date from 1922 to the present.
This collection includes dried, pinned and card-mounted adult insects, 200 of which are from the British Isles and represent 21 of the 30 British species. Most of these are part of the John Heath Collection but were collected by other well-known entomologists including Ralph Michael Greenslade (1908-1975) and Arthur Morel Massee (1899-1967) in the early 1900s.
There are examples from all over Scotland, including Rum, Colonsay and the Isle of Skye. Other locations represented in the collection include Brazil, eastern Germany, France, Greece, Borneo, New Zealand, Spain and the USA. However, the largest number of overseas specimens are from Trinidad and from various localities across the continent of Africa. The African specimens come from a variety of collectors. The material from Trinidad was collected by Glasgow Museums’ former Keeper of Natural History, E. G. Hancock during his field trips with Glasgow University in the 1990s.
About grasshoppers and crickets
There are over 20,000 species of grasshoppers and crickets worldwide, and there are 33 species in the British Isles. As well as grasshoppers and crickets, this insect order includes the locusts, katydids and groundhoppers. They are plant feeders. - Broader term
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