Orthopteran

orthopteran, broadly, any member of one of four insect orders. Orthopteran has come to be regarded as the common name for these related groups, which exhibit considerable morphological, physiological, and paleontological diversity. Although sometimes the insects are combined into the order Orthoptera, several orders are generally implied in the term orthopteran.

Among the orthopterans, cockroaches and mantids are placed in the order Dictyoptera, although they are sometimes placed in Blattodea and Mantodea, respectively, which may be considered as separate orders or as suborders of Dictyoptera. The grylloblattids (order Grylloblattodea) and walking sticks (order Phasmida) are given ordinal rank also. On the other hand, members of the suborders Ensifera (katydids, crickets, and camel crickets) and Caelifera (pygmy sand crickets, grasshoppers, and locusts) are considered to comprise the order Orthoptera. For completeness of discussion, all of these groups, handled here as four separate orders, are included in this article.

Orthopterans, abundant in tropical regions throughout the world in both numbers of species and individuals, are common in the summer months in temperate regions, when their relatively large size and chirping sounds attract considerable attention. Zoologists have long been interested in cockroaches, one of the oldest insect groups known. Most of the 24,000 species of orthopterans are plant feeders, with mouthparts adapted for chewing. Locusts, known as pests since biblical times, are very destructive to agricultural products.