Bioacoustics of Gryllotalpa africana

Diagnostic notes. Mole crickets carry a highly distinctive morphology within Orthoptera , including modified forelegs built for digging (Figs 182 , 183 ). The specific status of the mole crickets on Socotra is unclear. We used Townsend’s (1983) key to identify our male specimen collected in 2009 at Ridah, Momi. Most characteristics point to G. africana : the stridulatory teeth of the file are more widely spaced at the centre than at its extremities, the radius is divided distally into two branches and the phallic structure is large ( 3 mm ). Unfortunately, our specimen’s phallic structure is incomplete; only the pseudepiphallus, which is partly damaged, is present (Fig. 183 C ). It differs from the pseudepiphallus of G. africana , as depicted in Townsend (1983) . It also differs from the pseudepiphalli of G. unispina Saussure, 1874 , G. gryllotalpa (Linnaeus, 1758) and G. stepposa Zhantiev, 1991 , as shown in Iorgu et al. (2016) , while it is superficially similar to the one of G. krishnani Prassanna 2012 , depicted in Prassanna et al. (2012) and Frank (2020) .