Big, Bold Armored Crickets

It's early June, and Namibia's rainy season has just finished. This year has seen more than average rainfall, and the vast plains of the central plateau are covered with a thick carpet of grassland. But once the dry season takes hold, in a few months' time, most of this will be gone, either eaten or burnt, and the wildlife will have to survive on what's left until the first few drops of the wet season return at the end of the year. But for now, everything is making the most of this sudden burst of life. Look what I've got. Brilliant. Now, these here are armoured ground crickets. That big shield covered in those fairly aggressive-looking spines, all part of the job of making it a difficult bug to tackle by the predators. They're very bold. They don't make any effort to hide or blend in. So from that, I can kind of conclude they're probably fairly toxic, loaded with nasty compounds which they would have stolen from their food plant. What I've learned about these animals since I've been here kind of makes sense. They tend to peak in numbers. They become most abundant after the rains. And I found them feeding on this plant here. I don't know what it is, but I know it's a member of the pea family, so I know it's rich in protein, and that figures. When the rains come, plants like this stuff will grow very, very rapidly. And because they're loaded with protein, they're perfect for insects like this to bulk up. Now, these are definitely adults, I can tell, because I can hear them singing. Female in the foreground. You can see her egg-laying tube at the tip of her abdomen there. And he doesn't have one. But he does have, hidden away underneath his shield, which is incidentally a different shape to the females, he does have a tiny pair of wings. Not used for flying. These particular bush crickets have lost the power of flight. But he does use them to stridulate, which is a very posh word for making noise. They will be mating, and then she'll basically crawl down to the bottom of the plant here and lay eggs somewhere around the base of the plant, I would imagine, maybe even in the plant stem. Now, obviously, we know that being in the soil is a good place to be in the desert because the temperature and the humidity down there can remain a little bit more stable. And down there, in that little waterproof egg, they can sit out the really hard and arid times. And that's like a lot of insects here. A lot of them will get through the harsh times by basically disappearing into some form of torpor. And the egg is the perfect way of doing that. I lost them there for a moment. I think you get the idea. I really just wanted to show you some crickets. There you are. Crickets.