Phylogenetics and Systematics of Orthopteran Insects
Summary
Orthopteran insects—comprising grasshoppers, crickets, katydids and their allies—represent one of the most diverse and ecologically significant orders of terrestrial arthropods. Phylogenetic frameworks have transformed our understanding of their deep evolutionary history, tracing lineages back to the Carboniferous and revealing the timing of key innovations such as stridulatory apparatus and dietary shifts. Modern systematics integrates morphological characters, acoustic traits and molecular data to delimit species, resolve genus- and family-level relationships, and calibrate evolutionary trees with fossil evidence. Advances in high-throughput sequencing, including mitogenome assembly from both fresh and historic museum specimens, have unveiled cryptic diversity and clarified the biogeographical trajectories that led to endemic radiations in islands, forests and grasslands worldwide. Fossil discoveries preserved in amber and sedimentary deposits provide crucial calibration points, illuminating the antiquity of major clades and informing models of trait evolution. Together, these approaches generate a robust taxonomy that underpins biodiversity assessment, conservation strategies and studies of insect-mediated ecosystem processes on a global scale.
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Phylogenetics and Systematics of Orthopteran Insects publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in phylogenetics and systematics of orthopteran insects across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Phylogenetics: The study of evolutionary relationships among organisms, often represented by a branching tree diagram.
Systematics: The scientific discipline concerned with classifying organisms and determining their evolutionary interrelations.
Mitogenome: The complete mitochondrial DNA sequence of an organism, widely used in molecular phylogenetics.
Museomics: Genomic analysis of DNA extracted from museum or historical specimens to recover genetic data.
Fossil calibration: The use of dated fossil specimens to constrain divergence times in phylogenetic trees.
Monophyletic: A group of organisms that includes an ancestor and all of its descendants, forming a single branch on the tree of life.
References
- Museomics allows comparative analyses of mitochondrial genomes in the family Gryllidae (Insecta, Orthoptera) and confirms its phylogenetic relationships. PeerJ (2024).
- New Cretaceous crickets of the subfamilies Nemobiinae and Podoscirtinae (Orthoptera, Grylloidea: Trigonidiidae, Oecanthidae) attest the antiquity of these clades. Geological Magazine (2023).
- Colonization of different biomes drove the diversification of the Neotropical Eidmanacris crickets (Insecta: Orthoptera: Grylloidea: Phalangopsidae). PLOS ONE (2021).
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