Orthoptera in Mexico: Current status, challenges and future directions

The current knowledge of the Mexican Orthoptera is scattered throughout literature, mostly available from taxonomic monographs of early 20^th century. Considering the extremely diverse orthopteran fauna found in Mexico, there has been a general lack of studies on this group, except the ones focusing in plague control and ecological and faunistic studies. In terms of taxonomy, during 2000 – 2012, 68 new species have been described, mainly in Caelifera. The regions that need to be explored are the peninsulas of Yucatan and Baja California and the northwest part of Mexico. The Northeastern, Center and South part of Mexico have been studied in the recent years with positive results. Considering that there are about 26,000 species of Orthoptera worldwide and that Mexico is known to harbor about 10% of world fauna in all groups of vertebrates and in several groups of insects, we can extrapolate and estimate the potential diversity of Mexican Orthoptera to be at least 2,500 species, of which 1,000 species have been described. In Ensifera, Grylloidea and Tettigonoidea remain as the poorly studied groups. In Caelifera the description of new species will be constant, primarily in the highly diverse family Acrididae. The challenges are to incorporate molecular studies to solve evolutionary, phylogenetic and biogeographic questions, and to photograph the vast majority of species alive.