The Pneumoridae are a family of nocturnal short-horned grasshoppers in the order Orthoptera, commonly known as the bladder grasshoppers and the sole representative of the superfamily Pneumoroidea. Their centre of diversity is in southern Africa, but one species occurs as far north as South Sudan. Most adult males acquire an inflated abdomen, a specialization for amplified sound production, which is likely its primary function. Most genera display striking sexual dimorphism, and several species exhibit a dual male phenotype.
The Pneumoridae are a family of nocturnal short-horned grasshoppers in the order Orthoptera, commonly known as the bladder grasshoppers and the sole representative of the superfamily Pneumoroidea. Their centre of diversity is in southern Africa, but one species occurs as far north as South Sudan. Most adult males acquire an inflated abdomen, a specialization for amplified sound production, which is likely its primary function. Most genera display striking sexual dimorphism, and several species exhibit a dual male phenotype.
==Description== They are nocturnal, specialized herbivores which (with few exceptions) are endemic to coastal regions of southern Africa. The smallest species is Pneumoracris browni occurring in the Succulent Karoo ecoregion, while the largest is the wide-ranging Afromontane forest species, Physophorina livingstoni. {| class="wikitable" |- ! lateral ocelli relativeto antennal bases!! genus |- | above and slightly internally || Bullacris and related genera |- | intermediate position || Prostallia |- | above and slightly externally || Physophorina and Pneumora |}
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).