It’s an animal research smorgasbord today. First up, Claire Micheneau of the University of La Réunion reports observing crickets pollinate an orchid.

Now this might not seem like big news but actually it is the first time any insects of the Orthoptera order have been seen acting as pollinators, they report in Annals of Botany. Micheneau, a PhD student affiliated with the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London, and her colleagues observed an unknown species of raspy cricket climbing up leaves of the Angraecum cadetii orchid and jumping across from neighbouring plants to reach the flowers of this plant (pictured right), which is endemic species to the islands of Mauritius and Reunion.

“We knew from monitoring pollen content in the flowers that pollination was taking place. However, we did not observe it during the day. That’s why we rigged up a night camera and caught this raspy cricket in action. Watching the footage for the first time, and realising that we had filmed a truly surprising shift in the pollination of Angraecum, a genus that is mainly specialised for moth pollination, was thrilling,” says Micheneau (press release).

Meanwhile another team reports in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have confirmed that the Arctic tern (Sterna paradisaea) has the longest migration of any animal. Carsten Egevang, of the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources, and colleagues fitted 11 terns with tracking devices to follow them as they flew more than 80,000 km annually in some cases.

They also identified a previously unknown stopover point for the birds in the North Atlantic.

“They paused in their southward migration to spend time in highly productive waters in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Compared to this stop-over site, the marine area immediately to the south is lower in productivity,” says Richard Phillips, paper co-author and British Antarctic Survey researcher (press release).

“The indirect ‘S-shaped’ return journey in spring indicates that Arctic terns take full advantage of the prevailing global wind systems to reduce energetic costs on their long flight north.”

Finally, researchers at the University of Haifa in Israel have discovered a new species of spider, which can reach up to 14 cm in leg-span (pictured left). Named Cerbalus aravensis, the spider is underthreat as the sand dune on which it was discovered has been reduced from its former 7 square kilometre range to under 3 sq km, says the university.

Image top: raspy cricket carrying pollen on its head / Michenau and Fournel

Image lower: photo by Yael Olek, courtesy of the University of Haifa