Gryllomorpha (Gryllomorphella) miramae Medvedev, 1933

Iorgu, Ștefan, Chobanov, Dragan, Skolka, Marius, Zaharia, Răzvan & Iorgu, Elena Iulia, 2019, The first record of genus Gryllomorpha Fieber in Romania (Orthoptera: Gryllidae: Gryllomorphinae), Zootaxa 4543 (4), pp. 581-583 : 581-583

Gryllomorpha (Gryllomorphella) miramae Medvedev, 1933

Examined material: 1 ♀ (nymph), 2018.0 8.0 5, quarry west of Credința village, Constanța county, Romania, 43.9782°N 28.2277°E, 70 m ASL (obs. M. Skolka) ; 5 ♀♀, 2018.0 8.25, same locality (leg. I. Ș. Iorgu & R. Zaharia) ; 2 ♀♀, 2018.0 9.28, same locality (leg. I. Ș. Iorgu & R. Zaharia) ; 1 ♀, 2018.0 8.28, Techirghiol lake , Constanța county, Romania, 44.0243°N 28.6101°E, 10 m ASL (leg. I. Ș. Iorgu & R. Zaharia) .

In early August 2018, on a typically hot and sunny Dobrogean day, one of the authors (M.S.) observed a young cricket nymph while actively searching for insects under stones in a sarmatic quartzose sands quarry nearby the village of Credința ( fig. 1 ). Based on the taken photography, the insect was identified as most likely Gryllomorpha , a previously unknown cricket for the Romanian fauna. Several days later, an attempt of finding the insects at sundown was a disappointing failure. At the end of the summer, we decided to search for the crevice crickets at night, about two hours after the sunset. This time, the quest was successful and we managed to find five adult females at the light of headlamps, clearly identified as G. miramae ( fig. 1 ). Later on, the species was accidentally captured on a Barber trap placed on the shores of Techirghiol lake, along with numerous Gryllus campestris Linnaeus, Melanogryllus desertus (Pallas) and Modicogryllus truncatus (Tarbinsky) nymphs.

Gryllomorpha miramae is a nocturnal species, during the day staying hidden under stones or in the porous sarmatic rocks and possibly also in caves. In Bulgaria, the crevice cricket was recorded in dry stony areas within maquis ( Quercus coccifera communities), steppe-like habitats on limestone and Quercus sp., Carpinus orientalis communities up to 600 m ( Chobanov 2003 and own unpublished data). Even more interestingly, Medvedev indicated that the type specimens of Gryllomorpha miramae were collected in Citellus burrows ( Gorochov 2009).

Gryllomorpha miramae is characterized by a transversally striped pattern of dark and light brown, and Gorochov (2009) notes that the coloration is rather variable within the species: specimens from Europe have a clearly noticeable darkened area on the face, and dark, wide bands on body, while in individuals from Asia, the head is almost homogeneously yellowish and the body is shaded with narrow brownish stripes.

Despite the fact that Dobrogea is the most studied historical region in Romania, being frequently visited by biologists, several new findings within the past years proved that ambitious, exhaustive field work in unknown territories can produce surprizing results when it comes to survey the orthopterans, such as the finding of Zeuneriana amplipennis (Brunner von Wattenwyl, 1882) , Vichetia oblongicollis (Brunner von Wattenwyl, 1882) ( Iorgu 2011) , Gryllotalpa stepposa Zhantiev, 1991 ( Iorgu et al. 2016), Parapholidoptera castaneoviridis (Brunner von Wattenwyl, 1882) ( Iorgu et al. 2017) . The discovery of Gryllomorpha miramae in south-eastern Romania completes the distribution picture of this species, bridging the gap between the known occurrence areas.

Figures

FIGURE 1. Habitus of Gryllomorpha miramae (female) and the sarmatic sands quarry where the cricket was found for the first time in Romania (Credința, 2018.08).