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Alien origin and spread of this SINA species.
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Remarks:
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On 22 July 2018, at Archbold Biological Station (Highlands Co., FL), Brandon Woo collected two males of a katydid that he recognized as a member of the genus Phaneroptera. No member of this genus was previously known to occur in the state. He sent three photos of the katydid (see top row above) to Piotr Naskrecki and received this information in response: "Definitely Phaneroptera and my guess would be P. nana. The cerci are quite variable in this species and your photo agrees with one of the forms illustrated by Ragge 1956 in his revision of the genus."
The records for this species are all from Brandon Woo, but only the specimens from Archbold Biological Station were collected by him. The other records were from photographs taken by others and posted on iNaturalist (see plate for photos of the five known specimens other than the ones from Archbold). From north to south on the map above, the county records are Lakeland, Polk Co., Archbold BS, Highlands Co., Wellington, Palm Beach Co., Miami, Dade Co..
Note: The characters that make it easy to distinguish the males of Woo’s katydids from those of Mediterranean katydids are of little value in identifying female Phaneroptera from other genera of the subfamily Phaneropterinae. Thus how did Woo identify the five females depicted on the plate? Woo answers that it was from the unique morphology of the tarsi, which occurs only in Old World genera.
The occurence of the two superficially similar taxa of "Phaneroptera nana" in the U.S. that are, nonetheless, easily distinguishable by the ventral view of the male subgenital plate and cerci raises the question of the geographical origin of Woo's katydid. The origin of the Mediterranean katydid is likely Europe or the Mediterranean (see map). Searching OSFO images for potential useful images for distinguishing the subspecies of Ragge (1956) yielded only 6 images of three of the five candidate subspecies.
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References:
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Helfert & Saenger 1990,
Strohecker 1952b,
Tauber & Pener 2000,
Ragge 1956.
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Nomenclature:
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OSF (Orthoptera Species File Online).
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