TY - JOUR T1 - From an old sound recording to a new species in the genus Horatosphaga (Orthoptera: Tettigonioidea: Phaneropterinae: Acrometopini) JF - Zootaxa Y1 - 2017 A1 - Klaus-Gerhard Heller A1 - Edward Baker AB -

Among insects, Orthoptera are a group famous for communicating by sound. This is especially true for bush-crickets (or katydids; Tettigonioidea). All acoustically active species produce sound by rubbing the fore wings (tegmina) against each other, using a stridulatory file situated on the lower side of the left tegmen and a scraper formed by the inner edge of the right tegmen (see e.g., Ragge & Reynolds 1998). Bush-cricket species of the tribe Acrometopini often have complicated stridulatory files and also complex songs, as shown in a recent study (Hemp et al. 2017). During the preparation of that paper we discovered a sound record of a species of the group taken on 16th March 1972 by the entomologist David Hollis in Angola as part of the multi-disciplinary entomological South Western Africa Expedition (for more details see Lane et al. 2011, Pethers 2016). Hollis (principally a hemipterist) published several papers on different groups of insects (see http://bionames.org/authors/David%20Hollis; incomplete), including Orthoptera (see Ingrisch & Willemse 2004). The sound recording was deposited in the British Museum (Natural History) Library of Recorded Insect Sounds, and was later made openly accessible in the BioAcoustica repository (Baker et al. 2015). Hollis had found the animal at light, recorded it on the same day singing on a bush, and brought the specimen (together with two conspecific males) to the Natural History Museum (NHM), London. Here it was later identified as Horatosphaga ?stuhlmanni (Karsch 1896) by D. Ragge, the curator of Orthoptera at the NHM at that time. Under this name (Horatosphaga ?stuhlmanni) the song was described in Hemp et al. 2017. Horatosphaga males are fully winged while females are flightless and plump; sexual dimorphism reaches its extreme form in this group of species. Species of this genus are mostly recorded from open grasslands in savanna habitats up to montane elevations (e.g. H. heteromorpha, Hemp 2013).

VL - 4323 UR - https://biotaxa.org/Zootaxa/issue/view/zootaxa.4323.3 IS - 3 JO - Zootaxa ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Natural History Museum Sound Archive I: Orthoptera: Gryllotalpidae Leach, 1815, including 3D scans of burrow casts of Gryllotalpa gryllotalpa (Linnaeus, 1758) and Gryllotalpa vineae Bennet-Clark, 1970 JF - Biodiversity Data Journal Y1 - 2015 A1 - Edward Baker A1 - Broom, Yoke-Shum AB -

The Natural History Museum (NHM) sound archive contains recordings of Gryllotalpidae, and the NHM collection holds plaster casts of the burrows of two species. These recordings and burrows have until now not been made available through the NHM's collection database, making it hard for researchers to make use of these resources.
New information

Eighteen recordings of mole crickets (three identified species) held by the NHM have been made available under open licenses via BioAcoustica. 3D scans of the burrows of Gryllotalpa gryllotalpa (Linnaeus, 1758) and Gryllotalpa vineae Bennet-Clark, 1970 have been made available via the NHM Data Portal.

VL - 3 UR - http://bdj.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=7442 JO - BDJ ER - TY - Generic T1 - BioAcoustica: Talks: Insect Natural History Y1 - 2015 A1 - Edward Baker UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.5519/0013010 ER - TY - Generic T1 - BioAcoustica: Talks: Frederick W. Edwards Annual Lectures. Y1 - 2015 A1 - Edward Baker UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.5519/0013010 ER - TY - Generic T1 - NHM Sound Collection Y1 - 2014 A1 - Edward Baker A1 - Ben W. Price A1 - Broom, Sam A1 - Smith, Leroy UR - http://bio.acousti.ca/nontaxonomy/term/588 ER - TY - JOUR T1 - BioAcoustica: a free and open repository and analysis platform for bioacoustics JF - Database Y1 - 2015 A1 - Edward Baker A1 - Ben W. Price A1 - Rycroft, S. D. A1 - Hill, J. A1 - Smith, V. S. VL - 2015 UR - http://database.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/doi/10.1093/database/bav054 JO - Database ER - TY - JOUR T1 - Global Cicada Sound Collection I: Recordings from South Africa and Malawi by B. W. Price & M. H. Villet and harvesting of BioAcoustica data by GBIF JF - Biodiversity Data Journal Y1 - 2015 A1 - Edward Baker A1 - Ben W. Price A1 - Rycroft, Simon A1 - Martin H. Villet AB -

Background
Sound collections for singing insects provide important repositories that underpin existing research (e.g. Price et al. 2007 at http://bio.acousti.ca/node/11801; Price et al. 2010) and make bioacoustic collections available for future work, including insect communication (Ordish 1992), systematics (e.g. David et al. 2003), and automated identification (Bennett et al. 2015). The BioAcoustica platform (Baker et al. 2015) is both a repository and analysis platform for bioacoustic collections: allowing collections to be available in perpetuity, and also facilitating complex analyses using the BioVeL cloud infrastructure (Vicario et al. 2011). The Global Cicada Sound Collection is a project to make recordings of the world's cicadas (Hemiptera: Cicadidae) available using open licences to maximise their potential for study and reuse. This first component of the Global Cicada Sound Collection comprises recordings made between 2006 and 2008 of Cicadidae in South Africa and Malawi.

New Information
This collection of sounds includes 219 recordings of 133 voucher specimens, comprising 42 taxa (25 identified to species, all identified to genus) from South Africa and Malawi. The recordings have been used to underpin work on the species limits of cicadas in southern Africa, including Price et al. 2007 and Price et al. 2010. The specimens are deposited in the Albany Museum, Grahamstown, South Africa (AMGS).

The harvesting of acoustic data as occurrence records by GBIF has been implemented by the Scratchpads Team at the Natural History Museum, London. This link increases the value of individual recordings and the BioAcoustica platform within the global infrastructure of biodiversity informatics by making specimen/occurence records from BioAcoustica available to a wider audience, and allowing their integration with other occurence datasets that also contribute to GBIF.

VL - 3 UR - http://bdj.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=5792 JO - BDJ ER - TY - RPRT T1 - Speckled Bush Cricket Data Logger - Project Report Y1 - 2015 A1 - Bennett, Wil A1 - E. David Chesmore A1 - Edward Baker AB -

This report summarises work carried out on the Speckled Bush Cricket data logger project by Wil Bennett and Dave Chesmore at the University of York and Ed Baker at the Natural History Museum, who together designed and constructed - at the time of writing - a total of ten data logging devices to monitor the presence of Leptophyes punctatissima and other environmental variables such as temperature and humidity. This document summarises the capabilities and functionality of these devices, and comprehensively documents correct operational procedure for deploying the devices in the field.

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