花生大蟋 (Tarbinskiellus portentosus)

A heavyweight cricket on the grey concrete

It sat on the bare concrete in the late June heat of Medog, so still that I nearly stepped on it before my eyes registered what the shape was. The body was a deep blend of brown and black, the wings translucent and finely veined, and a pair of antennae stood straight up like twin whips testing the air. It held its ground as I crouched, and only the slow rise and fall of its sides showed it was alive at all.

This is Tarbinskiellus portentosus, a true cricket of the family Gryllidae, order Orthoptera. The name portentosus comes from Latin and means prodigious or monstrous, and for a cricket that is no exaggeration: this is one of the largest crickets in Asia, a heavy-bodied singer built on a scale that makes garden crickets look like understudies. The antennae that stood so upright are longer than the body, and like all crickets this one hears through small ear drums, or tympana, set on the front legs just below the knee. Like all crickets, too, the males sing by stridulation, rubbing the forewings together, and a male this size can throw his voice surprisingly far on a humid night.

Crickets are mostly omnivorous scavengers of plant matter and small insects, and a species this large has the jaws to make a meal of a surprising range of things. Around villages it is a familiar visitor, drawn to warm, damp corners where something is always edible, and in parts of Asia it is well known to cricket keepers, who value the biggest and loudest singers.

I left it to its afternoon on the concrete. Somewhere beyond the village it would be calling by dark, a big voice claiming the night for itself.