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Taxon Search: on the Adventures and Misadventures of an Entomologist

Presented by Academy of Natural Sciences at Academy of Natural Sciences

November 12, 2009

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Dr. Daniel Otte, the world's foremost authority on Orthoptera (grasshoppers and crickets), will receive the Academy of Natural Sciences’ prestigious Joseph Leidy Medal and give a presentation on his storied entomological expeditions to Africa, Australia, North America, and Caribbean and Pacific islands. Otte, the Academy’s curator of entomology, has spent four decades traveling the world—and risking life and limb in the process—to study, categorize and classify insects. He has described more than 1,500 new species of crickets, grasshoppers and other insects. He has vastly expanded the knowledge of insects through his publications, including more than 300 scientific articles and books. His latest book, Caribbean Crickets (The Orthopterists’ Society, 2009), is the first comprehensive assessment of crickets in the Caribbean islands and includes descriptions of 585 species, of which 458 are new to science. Otte, who can mimic cricket calls and has extensive recordings, has said that he can walk into a forest anywhere in the world and determine its environmental health just by listening to which crickets are chirping.