
Thoracistus is a genus of decticine or shield-backed katydids in the family Tettigoniidae. The mostly carnivorous genus is endemic to South Africa.
GENUS
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Thoracistus is a genus of decticine or shield-backed katydids in the family Tettigoniidae. The mostly carnivorous genus is endemic to South Africa.
==Morphology== This genus of decticine is extreme in the extent of its inflated pronotum. The pronotum completely conceals the tiny wings, which are used for stridulation only. The pronotum functions as a resonating chamber, to amplify the singing of the male. As in all decticines a "free plantula" is found at the base of the tarsus of the jumping leg. This pair of elongate pads may aid jumping in ground biomes.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).