For the first time since its description in 1927, the Limnos Plump Bush-Cricket (Isoypha lemnotica) has been rediscovered on the Greek island Limnos.
During an excursion in May 2015, Luc Willemse, member of the IUCN SSC Grasshopper Specialist Group has rediscovered a rare bush-cricket species that was lost since 1927. The Limnos Plump Bush-Cricket is endemic to the Greek Aegean island Limnos (sometimes also called Lemnos). Since its description, the species has never been seen or collected again, but as with so many insect species, no-one had searched specifically for it. Luc was able to record the song and found that the species is even quite common on Lemnos. Bioacoustics helped to get a clearer picture of its distribution. By visually searching for the species, Luc found ten localities of this species, but on 15 further localities, he could here its specific song.
The species is currently listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. The new information will be fed into the European Red List of Orthoptera project, which is currently in progress - aiming at completing the Red List assessments of 1088 grasshopper, cricket and bush-cricket species that occur in Europe.
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