Difference between cricket and katydid?

Question

What is the best way to tell a cricket from a katydid? I know the cricket has a longer cerci, but what else? Does it have to do with the insects' songs? Any ideas would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

The following article at National Geographic by John Roach details differences:

In a nighttime chorus of insects, the easiest way to identify individual katydid and cricket species is by listening to their songs, according to one of the world's leading authorities on the jumping insects.

"Without sound, we'd be in a pickle," said Thomas Walker, an entomologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Relying on morphology—body shape, structure, and color—to identify some katydids and crickets is next to impossible, he says.

"With DNA and so forth, we can. But for some species there's no way to identify them on the pin," he said, referring to insects held on display boards with special pins.

Crickets and katydids are closely related insects that all have big hind legs for jumping, long antennae, ears on their front legs, and wings that fold like a fan.

Trained scientists can tell the difference between the two types of insects, because crickets have three segmented feet while katydids have four.

But even for experts, just looking at the creatures doesn't easily reveal when two distinct species are side by side.

For example, the sand field cricket (Gryllus firmus) and the southeastern field cricket (Gryllus rubens) look nearly identical and inhabit the same geographical areas.

To tell them apart, Walker relies on his ears.



"A three-year-old can tell the difference," Walker said.

Crickets and katydids make noise by rubbing their forewings together. The upper wing has a series of serrated teeth called a file, and the lower wing has a scraper.

As the insects rub the scraper against the file, the wings amplify the sound, making it loud enough for other insects to hear.

Walker learned to identify katydids and crickets based on their songs while he was a graduate student at Ohio State University in Columbus in the late 1950s.

He was studying so-called tree crickets that inhabit weedy fields. They all looked alike, he says, but when he listened to their sounds, he heard four distinct tunes.

... read the rest of the article (there are 2 pages) at the links below

Answer 2

Katydid Cricket

Answer 3

Cricket is played by two teams of eleven members. One team bats and the other bowls. (What) Katydid is a book. Both are a lot of fun, but otherwise they're totally different.