A small black cricket that rings like a bell
It sat on the rim of a blue plastic bottle cap, perfectly still, as if it had decided the cap was a good place to think. Dark, almost black, with antennae longer than its whole body, it looked like a cricket dipped in ink. I photographed it from several angles before it finally hopped off.
This is Meloimorpha japonica (Haan, 1844), the Japanese bell cricket, known in Japan as suzumushi. The name comes from its song: a slow, ringing trill that sounds like a tiny bell. In East Asia this is one of the classic “singing insects,” kept for its voice for centuries and a fixture of Japanese autumn culture.
Its classification has a curious history. For a long time it sat among the true crickets in Gryllidae. Current taxonomy (GBIF, accepted name) places it in Phalangopsidae, a family of crickets that includes many cave and litter-dwelling species, though the bell cricket itself is a free-living singer of fields and gardens.
It is a medium-sized cricket, dark brown to black, with long filiform antennae, strong jumping hind legs, and in females a long blade-like ovipositor used to lay eggs in the soil or plant stems. It is distributed across East Asia, including Japan, Korea and China.
female. interesting 🙂