Meconema meridionale A. Costa 1860

Holuša, Jaroslav, Kočárek, Petr, Vlk, Robert & Marhoul, Pavel, 2013, Annotated checklist of the grasshoppers and crickets (Orthoptera) of the Czech Republic, Zootaxa 3616 (5), pp. 437-460 : 442

Meconema meridionale A. Costa 1860

Material examined. Bohemia centr., Praha-Suchdol, 28.x.2012, 1 F, I. Křížová leg., J. Holuša det. et coll.

M. meridionale occurred until 1900 or even the 1950s only in Italy and some neighboring countries. During the 1960s, M. meridionale began to expand northwards from its original area of distribution and gradually occupied the northern Alps, southern Germany, and northern France. During the 1990s, it reached central Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Hungary, and in 2001 it was found in Great Britain. An isolated population was also found along the northeast coast of the Black Sea in Bulgaria in 2002. During the last 5 years, it occupied northern Germany (Vlk et al. 2012).

In the CR, M. meridionale was observed for the first time in a camping site in Prague in September 2008. One year later, it was caught in a camping site at Slapy, about 35 km (SSE) from the first locality. Both of these first records of M. meridionale in the CR were merely incidental (Balvín et al. 2010). The records of M. meridionale in the CR come mostly from urban environments or they are connected with the car traffic and clearly support the idea of its passive dispersal by cars, especially by caravans and trucks (Chládek 2009; Vlk et al. 2012). However, it has been found recently also in a sparse deciduous forest, which represents the habitat type preferred in the original area of distribution, i.e., in southern Europe. The current known distribution is concentrated in lower altitudes in Central Bohemia, especially in Prague, and in Southern Moravia, especially in Brno, and also southwards along the main road to Mikulov (Vlk et al. 2012).