High-speed duetting-latency times of the female acoustic response within the bush-cricket genera Leptophyes and Andreiniimon (Orthoptera, Phaneropteridae)

To find a mate, male and female bush-crickets of the family Phaneropteridae typically engage in duets.The male sings and the female responds. For mutual recognition, the amplitude pattern of the male songand the species-specific timing of the female response have been shown to be very important. In the sevenstudied species, belonging to the genera Leptophyes and Andreiniimon, these duets are extremely fast andnearly completely in the ultrasonic range. The females produce very short sounds by fast closing movementsof the tegmina. They respond with species-specific delays of 20 to 150 ms after the beginning ofthe male song. The different latency times are probably not important for species recognition, since insympatric species they are quite similar.