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Sticker of Roesel's bush-cricket
Bug card No. 1165 of 1,500

Roesel's bush-cricket

Roeseliana roeselii
Name means: “named after August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof, a German insect scientist”
Eats: A bit of everythingGrasshoppers and cricketsGardens and meadows6 legs

Roesel's bush-cricket is a brown or yellowish cricket with pale yellow-green spots on its sides, just behind its head. It loves tall, wild grass in meadows. Most of them have short wings and walk or hop instead of flying.

Lives in
Europe and western Siberia, in meadows with tall grass
Length
1.3 to 2.6 cm (0.51 to 1 in)
Top speed
about 3.4 km/h (2.1 mph)
On foot, estimate
Can it hurt you?
Harmless
Harmless. It is a shy meadow insect that hops away when you come close.
What does it eat?
It eats tall grass and grass seeds, and it also catches smaller insects.
For real!Photo of Roesel's bush-cricket
Picture by Richard Bartz , Munich aka Makro Freak. CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.

How big is it?

How long is it?

Roesel's bush-cricket about 2.6 cm long (1 in)A grain of rice about 6 mm (0.24 in)A toy building brick about 3.2 cm (1.3 in)A crayon about 9 cm (3.5 in)
as long as 4 grains of rice in a rowcould run across a dinner table in 1.1 secondsmoves 36 times its own body length every second

How big is Roesel's bush-cricket compared to YOU?

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How fast is it?

cool stuff

Fun facts

1

The girls have a long, sword-like tube at the end of the body. They use it to cut open grass stems and lay their eggs inside.

2

Only very few of them grow long wings. These long-winged ones fly off to find new meadows to live in.

3

Long, warm summers make more of the long-winged ones grow.

4

The short-winged ones travel by walking along grassy roadsides and ditches.

5

The babies come out in May and change their skin five or six times before they are grown up.

you asked

Most asked questions about Roesel's bush-cricket

?What does Roesel's bush-cricket eat?

Grass, grass seeds and small insects.

?Can Roesel's bush-cricket fly?

Most cannot, because their wings are short. A few grow long wings and can fly far.

?How big is Roesel's bush-cricket?

It is about 13 to 26 millimetres long.

For bug experts

Scientific name
Roeseliana roeselii
Named by
Hagenbach, 1822
Group
Grasshoppers and crickets
Family
Tettigoniidae
Classification
Insecta > Orthoptera > Tettigoniidae
Lives on
Europe, Asia

Where the facts come from

  1. Roesel's bush-cricket (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
  2. Picture by Richard Bartz , Munich aka Makro Freak. CC BY-SA 2.5, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.

If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.

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