Our treasure of the month: The spotted snare grasshopper

The spotted grasshopper(Bryodemella tuberculata) gets its name from the buzzing sound it makes when flying up to 50 metres and its strikingly bright, spotted colouring. Males in particular can take off with their well-developed wings, while females prefer to stay on the ground. The reason for this is the mating behaviour, in which the males fly around the sitting female, buzzing and courting.

The collection at the Museum der Natur Hamburg mainly contains historical finds - like our treasure - from the area surrounding the Hanseatic city. More recent finds from the region around the Isar and from Asia, collected by LIB researchers in the course of their scientific fieldwork, have recently been added. A total of around 15 specimens can be found in the Entomological Collection. The oldest specimens, such as our treasure, have been part of the collection since the Natural History Museum was founded.

At around 30 to 40 millimetres in length, the spotted grasshopper is one of the largest grasshoppers in Central Europe. Our treasure of the month shows that more than 100 years ago it was still found near Hamburg. It was found in Buchwedel near Stelle, around 30 kilometres from Hamburg. Today, it lacks suitable habitats, as its habitat has been destroyed by us humans in order to practise agriculture. The former heathland has given way to industrial agriculture and riverbanks have been straightened for shipping.

In the Lüneburg Heath, the ecosystem has now been renaturalised, meaning that the landscape has been actively transformed back into heathland. This has created a new habitat in which our treasure should feel at home again. According to Lara-Sophie Dey, who has studied our treasure extensively as part of her research at the LIB and currently heads the molecular laboratory at the Museum der Natur Hamburg, military training areas or unstraightened riverbanks in northern Germany would also provide a suitable habitat.

Nevertheless, a new group of grasshoppers cannot simply be released into the wild there, says Lara-Sophie Dey: "We are observing that the spotted grasshopper is becoming rarer in the big four areas in Europe and is losing its genetic diversity. To ensure the long-term survival of the species, we need this genetic diversity, which is difficult to create artificially." The protection of the species is also important because it would not only benefit our treasure, but also related species such as the red-winged grasshopper(Psophus stridulus) orTuerki's grasshopper(Tetrix tuerki).