A Taxonomic Study Of Grasshoppers From Shandong Province

The grasshoppers belong to the Acridoidea, Caelifera, Orthoptera, Insecta, Arthropoda. At present, about 12000 species of grasshoppers belonging to 2364 genera were found in the world, among them 1200 species or so belonging to 283 genera distributed in China.Located in the east part of China, Shandong is a big agricultural province, also an important locust and grasshopper occurrence area in China, among which Locusta migratoria maniliensis (Meyen, 1835), Haplotropis brunneriana Saussure, 1888, Atractomorpha sinensis I.Bolivar, 1905, Aiolopus tamulus (Fabricius, 1798), Oxya chinensis (Thunberg, 1815), Hieroglyphus annulicornis (Shiraki, 1910), Oedaleus infernalis Saussure, 1884, Chondracris rosea rosea (De Geer, 1773) are important insect pests to agriculture or pasture. As we all know, Locusta migratoria maniliensis (Meyen, 1835) is a very famous pest of China in history. So it is important to comprehensively study the taxonomy of the grasshoppers, which help to control or use some grasshoppers.Based on the published works, Fauna of China (Xia et al, 1994; Zheng et al, 1998;Yin et al, 2003; Li et al, 2006) and The grasshoppers of Shandong (Sun and Yan 1999), 7 families, 31 genera and 52 species of grasshoppers distributed in Shandong Province. During the identification of grasshopper specimens collected from Shandong Province from 2008 to 2009, three new species of grasshoppers in science, i.e. Arcyptera flavivittata Yin & Mo, 2009, Chorthippus taishanensis sp. nov. and Sphingonotus cyaneitibialis sp. nov., were found.All known species and the three new species of grasshoppers from Shandong were described in this paper with detailed character figures and distribution maps for each species in Shandong. The keys to families, subfamilies, genera and species of grasshoppers were also given in this paper.