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An illustration based on the real animal.
A little discovery to share.
Bell crickets spend the winter as eggs.
THE REAL WORLD
The real Bell cricket
- Scientific name
- Meloimorpha japonica
- Japanese name
- スズムシ
- Group
- Insects
- Class
- Insecta
- Order
- Orthoptera
- Family
- Gryllidae
- Genus
- Meloimorpha
A member of the cricket family. It lives on the ground in dark, damp thickets of tall grasses such as Japanese pampas grass.
Its body is dark brown to blackish, and its pale yellowish-brown antennae are white in the middle.
When many others are nearby it sings 'reen, reen', but when few are around it switches to a different song, 'rii, rii'.
How the Bell cricket lives
The eggs hatch around summer. They eat both animal and plant matter. They become winged adults in summer. Females lay their eggs in the soil.
国土交通省 太田川河川事務所Basic data
- Size
- Body length: males about 21 mm, females about 23 mm
- Diet
- Animal and plant matter
- Range
- Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu, northeastern China, the Korean Peninsula, and elsewhere
Where the Bell cricket has been recorded
Records: GBIF.org (CC0 and CC BY 4.0 records, retrieved 2026-11-07). Map: Natural EarthSee the records on GBIF
Watch wild animals from a distance. Do not touch or feed them, and take care of the places where they live.
Names around the world
Names come from Wikidata and iNaturalist records. Where a language has no recorded name, we use the scientific name.
Sources and how we check
- 国土交通省 太田川河川事務所 — 太田川生物誌 スズムシChecked: 2026-11-03
We check each fact against its source. The illustrations simplify how the real animal looks.
The classification (class, order, family, genus) follows Wikidata records, checked against GBIF. Classifications can change as research goes on.
The basic data are the values given in each source. They vary with how the animal is measured, whether it is male or female, and whether it lives in the wild or in captivity.
This page was translated from the original Japanese with the help of AI.
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