Community science includes the participation of people who are not professional scientists in the collection, analysis or interpretation of scientific data. Two broad approaches were distinguished in the review. In guided projects, scientists lead data collection through an established protocol and work directly with volunteers or organizations, sometimes through platforms such as Zooniverse. In open projects, individuals work largely independently and share records through social media or apps such as iNaturalist. These approaches can expand the geographic coverage and volume of ecological data available to researchers, particularly when observations are contributed over many locations and across extended periods.

Orthopterans are prominent members of the insect group that represents a large share of Earth’s biodiversity, a group for which reports of severe insect declines have raised concern. They occupy rural and suburban backyards, urban parks and vacant lots, where the calls of many males form an acoustic feature of summer. Their short life cycles and, in some species, specialization in habitat, food and egg-laying make them useful indicators in climate-change research. However, the review notes that there is still too little information about extant insect biodiversity to understand the causes and consequences of population declines, strengthening the potential value of continuous community-science monitoring.

Many male orthopterans call to attract mates, which makes it relatively straightforward to quantify species richness, abundance and emergence times from acoustic surveys. Scientists can identify species from their acoustic profiles, while community scientists can record sounds from trails and roadsides without collecting specimens. Acoustic monitoring can be especially useful in fragile habitats or for threatened species because it may reduce the need for repeated physical disturbance. A single recording can also contain calls from several taxa, potentially allowing existing recordings to be used more extensively, increasing the rate of new data collection, reducing costs and encouraging collaboration.

Smartphones provide many of the tools needed for such work, including audio and video recording, global positioning and internet access. Tools such as TADARIDA, a toolbox for animal detection in acoustic recordings that integrates discriminant analysis, as well as artificial-intelligence methods, can make large collections of acoustic and photographic data more useful. The review describes nationwide community-science acoustic monitoring in some locations and taxa, including FrogID and bird-monitoring programs. These examples show how the same basic technology can support repeated observations, but the reviewed orthopteran literature itself contained only four studies that directly used community-collected acoustic data.

The scale of open participation was illustrated by iNaturalist records available on July 14, 2022. The platform contained 1,128,486 orthopteran records accompanied by photographs and observation localities for 5,732 species. Such records can help researchers identify occurrences, document range expansion and track other distributional patterns. Local participation may also provide valuable knowledge about where singing insects occur, while residents can contribute observations throughout the year, including periods when distant research teams are unlikely to be conducting fieldwork. Community-science initiatives have also been used to monitor conservation efforts, rediscover species thought to be extinct, identify new species and document invasive species or range expansion.

The review characterized 43% of the 14 studies as guided and 50% as open, leaving the type unclear in the remaining 7%. Most major orthopteran groups were represented, including grasshoppers, crickets, katydids and wetas, but taxonomic coverage within each group was limited largely to new, rare or invasive species. Guided studies generally involved groups of fewer than 15 people, whereas open studies typically did not report the number of nonprofessional participants. This omission prevents consistent evaluation of project reach and the amount of volunteer labor contributed, making participant numbers a relevant measure when comparing the scale of different initiatives.

Online analysis provides another route for community scientists to contribute to orthopteran research. The ongoing Cricket Wing project on Zooniverse asks participants to classify microscope images of live and dead cricket sperm cells and immune cells, or hemocytes. The underlying research examines how traffic noise may affect immune and reproductive traits, areas for which relatively little physiological evidence about orthopterans is available. At the time of the source’s July 14, 2022 access, the project had generated 12,304 sperm-cell images and 1,917 hemocyte images. Each image was classified ten times before the final count was recorded, a redundancy measure intended to control classification error and bias.

By July 14, 2022, Cricket Wing had registered 700 participants since its May 10, 2022 launch and recorded 38,497 classifications, comprising 37,356 sperm counts and 1,141 hemocyte counts. Guides, tutorials and an open discussion forum help participants troubleshoot tasks and learn about the broader science. The project is also being used in high-school outreach, while its developers plan to extend it to questions involving rapid adaptation through song analysis and machine learning. These are future directions rather than reported experimental results; the current project’s demonstrated role is the large-scale community analysis of images for the research into cricket immune and reproductive traits.

Effective programs require clear, concise protocols that specify how volunteers access study organisms, where target species can be found, how sounds should be recorded and how observations should be documented. Instructions should cover recording distance and duration, locality, date, time, habitat and general notes, as well as procedures for backing up or sharing files. Workshops, field notes, video demonstrations, online tutorials and example recordings can provide training, while an “unsure” option may reduce forced identifications. Training duration, practice and the mode of instruction can affect data quality, and replication through independent observers or repeated classifications can help reveal error and observer variation.

Projects must also account for spatial and temporal sampling bias, as well as the difficulty of correcting uneven coverage without introducing further problems. The authors therefore recommend matching analytical techniques to the question, planning sampling in advance and determining the appropriate balance between community-generated and professionally collected data. Despite the potential of community scientists to track species abundance, richness, emergence time and distributional change through sound, organized long-term orthopteran programs remain scarce. With training, replication and sampling plans designed to reduce avoidable harm, community science can turn the calls of crickets, grasshoppers and other orthopterans into sustained ecological evidence while engaging the public in the research process.

Subject of Research: Community science for orthopteran ecological monitoring and image-based analysis

Article Title: The role of community science in orthopteran research

Article References: Byerly, A. R., Firneno Jr., T. J., Beard, R., & Larson, E. L. (2023). The role of community science in orthopteran research. Journal of Orthoptera Research, 32(2), 109-114. https://doi.org/10.3897/jor.32.90444

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/jor.32.90444

Keywords: community science, orthopterans, acoustic monitoring, biodiversity, grasshoppers, crickets, katydids, smartphone sensors, citizen science, conservation, role, community

The distinction matters because size and shape can be conflated when researchers compare only one anatomical measurement. Sexual size dimorphism refers to differences in overall body magnitude, whereas sexual shape dimorphism describes differences in the proportions of body structures. A difference in total length or head width may therefore reflect a sex-specific body plan rather than a general tendency for one sex to be larger across every dimension. The study combined four measurements—head width, maxillae span, pronotum length and mean hind femur length—using statistical methods designed to distinguish overall size from shape.

For the main experiment, the authors examined 167 adult crickets initially: 71 males and 96 females. One male was excluded because he had deformed forewings, while 26 females were removed with a random number generator to create equal analytical groups of 70 males and 70 females. The animals came from a laboratory colony founded with crickets collected near Winslow, Arizona, and were reared at 25 °C, 70% relative humidity and a 12-hour light:12-hour dark daily cycle. The colony was euthanized at -20 °C for 24 hours when the study ended, and the preserved individuals were measured under a stereomicroscope. Standardized images were used to place landmarks and convert views into linear measurements; the left and right femur lengths were averaged to produce a single hind-leg measure.

Every one of the four measured traits differed significantly between males and females, but the direction of the differences changed from one structure to another. Adult males had wider heads, averaging 5.18 millimetres compared with 4.99 millimetres in females, and broader maxillae spans, 4.87 millimetres versus 4.38 millimetres. Females went in the opposite direction for the other two structures: their pronota averaged 3.45 millimetres, compared with 3.29 millimetres in males, and their mean hind femora were 10.22 millimetres long, compared with 9.90 millimetres in males. The four measurements had means plus or minus standard deviations and observed ranges in the study, with 70 individuals in each sex. Because some dimensions favored males while others favored females, the raw differences could not be summarized as males being larger or females being larger.

The researchers then combined the measurements in two complementary ways. First, they calculated the geometric mean of the four traits as a multivariate index of overall size. Males averaged 5.35 on that index and females 5.27, but the difference was not statistically significant in a t-test. Second, they used principal components analysis to create uncorrelated axes, with the first component interpreted as a multivariate size measure and the second as a shape variable. The sexes did not differ on the first principal component, which accounted for 78.311% of the variance, but they differed strongly on the second, which accounted for 17.471%. The second-component difference was highly significant, with a t statistic of 16.961 and p less than 0.001; the first-component difference was not significant, with a t statistic of 0.888 and p of 0.376. Together, these analyses indicated sexual shape dimorphism without detectable sexual size dimorphism. The authors cautioned that the conclusion is conditional on the traits measured and does not prove that males and females are identical in size.

A discriminant function analysis provided an additional test by asking whether a weighted combination of the measurements could identify an individual’s sex. The resulting function classified 64 of 70 males and 66 of 70 females correctly, or 91.4% and 94.3% respectively, and the overall discriminant function was significant, with a chi-square value of 167.489 and p less than 0.001. Head width and maxillae span loaded positively on the function, whereas pronotum length and mean femur length loaded negatively, closely matching the pattern identified by principal components analysis. The strongest statistical separation between the sexes therefore consisted of a contrast between relatively broad heads and mouthparts in males and relatively long thoraces and hind legs in females, rather than a simple difference in overall magnitude.

The study also produced a simple shape index: the ratio of head width to pronotum length. This ratio differed significantly between the sexes, with a t statistic of 11.520 and p less than 0.001, and was strongly correlated with both the second principal component and the discriminant function. Because ratios are independent of image magnification, they can be calculated from photographs without absolute calibration. The researchers applied that approach to citizen-science records on iNaturalist, selecting research-grade observations with a photograph taken from above and perpendicular to the frontal plane. Their usable wild sample contained nine females and one male, too small for a statistical comparison with the laboratory group, but the single male had a higher head-width-to-pronotum ratio than the wild females, as did laboratory males relative to laboratory females.

The wild ratios were also less than 5% different from the averages for laboratory-reared crickets. Although the tiny sample precluded strong statistical inference, the result was consistent with the proportional pattern persisting in wild animals rather than being solely a laboratory effect. The iNaturalist comparison also illustrates a possible route for studying morphology at broad scale: citizen scientists can supply images for traits visible from standard viewpoints. The authors noted that automated image-recognition systems also depend on scale-independent characteristics such as ratios among dimensions, making image-based morphometric measurements compatible with large digital collections. The data set, photographs and measurements from the laboratory study were made available through Dryad, allowing the analyses to be checked and extended.

Why might males and females emphasize different body regions? One plausible explanation involves male competition. Male field crickets can grapple with rivals using their heads and mouthparts, and relatively larger male heads have been linked to success in aggressive contests in the fall field cricket. If male badlands crickets use similar tactics, sexual selection could favor broader heads and maxillae. A complementary possibility concerns movement. Females search for sedentary singing males while attempting to avoid predators, and longer legs could support greater stride length, while a larger thorax could accommodate more leg muscle. These are proposed explanations rather than demonstrated mechanisms. The researchers called for future work to examine sex-specific mobility, diet, burrow digging and aggression, as well as the adaptive significance of variation in head and mouthpart size versus thorax and leg size.

The results also challenge a widespread assumption about sexual size dimorphism in Orthoptera, the order that includes crickets, katydids, grasshoppers and their allies. A review of more than 1,500 species reported almost universal female-biased size dimorphism, but much of that evidence came from total body length alone. Total length can vary with nutritional status, egg development and preservation, and a difference in one structure can be mistaken for a difference in overall size. The badlands cricket result shows why researchers need to measure multiple body regions and explicitly test shape as well as size. The authors recommend using the geometric mean of head width, pronotum length and hind femur length as a practical index for orthopteran studies. They argue that this measure is multivariate, represents multiple body regions and axes, is convenient for live or preserved specimens, applies broadly across Orthoptera, is comparable between samples, and avoids the abdomen’s sensitivity to condition and preservation artifacts. Wider adoption could help determine whether apparent size differences across species are genuine or partly products of differing body shape.

Subject of Research: Sexual shape dimorphism and body-size measurements in adult badlands crickets

Article Title: Sexual dimorphism in the badlands cricket ( Orthoptera , Gryllinae , Gryllus personatus )

Article References: Madera, E. M., & Judge, K. A. (2023). Sexual dimorphism in the badlands cricket (Orthoptera, Gryllinae, Gryllus personatus). Journal of Orthoptera Research, 32(2), 119-126. https://doi.org/10.3897/jor.32.93513

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/jor.32.93513

Keywords: badlands cricket, Gryllus personatus, sexual dimorphism, body shape, body size, morphometrics, orthopterans, sexual selection, iNaturalist, citizen science, Sexual, dimorphism