Katydids (Tettigoniidae)

Kecek or katydids or bush crickets (Tettigoniidae) is a family of insects in Orthoptera, recorded to have 6,400 species, active at night by loud mating calls, having mimicry and camouflage appearances generally with leaf-like shapes and colors.

Tettigoniid have a size of 5-130 mm, live in plants, very long antennae, often make noise at night during the rainy season and early summer, around one year old and females usually lay eggs at the beginning of rain and are placed underground or in plant holes.

The hind legs are longer than the front and middle legs which are often used for jumping. Some species can fly. Katydids eat leaves, flowers, bark and seeds, but many species are predators eating other insects, snails and small vertebrates.

Males have a sound-producing organ in the back corner of the front wing. The sound is produced by rubbing the two parts of the body together. Females are usually larger than males and have a long sharp structure at the tip of the abdomen which is an ovipositor for attaching eggs.

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Subphylum: Hexapoda
Class: Insecta
Subclass: Pterygota
Order: Orthoptera
Suborder: Ensifera
Infraorder: Tettigoniidea
Superfamily: Tettigonioidea
Family: Tettigoniidae

Cogon grass (Imperata cylindrica)

Alang-alang or cogon grass ( Imperata cylindrica ) is a plant species in Poaceae, annual grass, sharp leaf, long buds and scaly, creeping under the ground, very adaptive and grows in all climates which often become weeds on agricultural land. I. cylindrica has a sharp pointed tip of the bud and emerges from the ground, height of 0.2-1.5 m but in other places it may be more, short stems, rising up to the ground and flowering white or purplish, often with wreath of hair under the segment. Leaf strands in the form of long ribbons, lancet-tipped with a narrow base and gutter-shaped, 12-80 cm long, very coarse edge and jagged sharply, long hair at the base with broad, pale leaf bones in the middle. The flowers are panicles, 6-28 cm long with long-haired and white-colored ears for 1 cm which are used as a tool to blow off the fruit when ripe. Cogon grass breeds quickly with seeds that spread quickly with the wind or through rhizomes that quickly penetrate the soil. Alang-alang does...

Thomas Sutikna lives with Homo floresiensis

BLOG - On October 28, 2004, a paper was published in Nature describing the dwarf hominin we know today as Homo floresiensis that has shocked the world. The report changed the geographical landscape of early humans that previously stated that the Pleistocene Asia was only represented by two species, Homo erectus and Homo sapiens . The report titled "A new small-bodied hominin from the Late Pleistocene of Flores, Indonesia" written by Peter Brown and Mike J. Morwood from the University of New England with Thomas Sutikna, Raden Pandji Soejono, Jatmiko, E. Wahyu Saptomo and Rokus Awe Due from the National Archaeology Research Institute (ARKENAS), Indonesia, presents more diversity in the genus Homo. “Immediately, my fever vanished. I couldn’t sleep well that night. I couldn’t wait for sunrise. In the early morning we went to the site, and when we arrived in the cave, I didn’t say a thing because both my mind and heart couldn’t handle this incredible moment. I just went down...

The ancestor of Homo floresiensis lived 700,000 years ago was smaller

NEWS - The remains of Homo floresiensis found by Australian-New Zealand archaeologist, Professor Mike Morwood (1950-2013) in Liang Bua cave, Flores, in 2003 gradually revealed its evolutionary origins. The very small adult leg bones belonging to the small-brained "Hobbit of Flores" are at least 700,000 years old. Previous archaeological evidence suggests that these tiny humans inhabited Liang Bua around 50,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens had long settled in southern Australia which ultimately gave rise to much debate about the origins of Flores humans. A hypothesis is that H. floresiensis is a hybrid of early Asian Homo erectus . Another hypothesis is the remains of a more ancient hominin from Africa before H. erectus and small-bodied from the start. If so, the likely candidates are Homo habilis or Australopithecus afarensis . Another hominin fossil ever found on Flores is the Mata Menge site 75 km to the east. The earlier site in the tropical grasslands of the So...

Dlium