Alien origin and spread of this SINA species. Anurogryllus celerinictus has a distinctive, very loud, calling song. In Walker’s 1973 paper on the systematics and acoustics of Anurogryllus, he documented that A. celerinictus is abundant in Jamaica and has been found once in Grand Cayman. Its presence in Cuba is well-documented in a preprint of a paper by A.L. Stubbs and Fernando Montealegre-Z uploaded to bioRxiv on 4 Jan 2019. In this preprint the authors report that a diplomat’s recording of an alleged sonic attack was actually just A. celerinictus "doing a mating call." Thus it is no surprise that when Tom Walker heard this song in the Lower Keys on 19 January 1970 he could be confident that it was the calling song of an A. celerinictus and that a flying male must have been caught in a Cuban storm and landed 90 miles later in the Florida Keys. This confidence proved justified when, on 11 June 1970, he again heard a calling male in the Lower Keys, traced it to its source, and captured it. The next Florida records were by Brandon Woo, who, on 15 July 2018 caught two calling males in metropolitan south Florida—one in Homestead and the other in south Miami. He reported the Miami male in BugGuide and both records to the editor of SINA. In August 2021, Woo found the species to be abundant in Homestead and Miami. In a disturbed, open meadow habitat, at the Patch of Heaven Sanctuary (21900 SW 157th Avenue, Miami) he collected 5 males and recorded the song.
15 s of calling song, male from Miami-Dade County, Florida. Recording by Brandon Woo.
20 s of calling song, male from Big Pine Key, Monroe County, Fla., 27.0°C. Dominant frequency 6.9 kHz (WTL492-1). Click on sound bar to hear entire recording.
This spectrogram is a 1 s excerpt of the 20 s audio file accessible above. The excerpt begins at 7 s. Click on spectrogram to expand seven pulses from spectrographic image.
