With heart pounding and hoping beyond hope that the mystery predator wouldn’t “spook” and retreat, I cut back the branches of the Golden cane till there was enough room for the camera and flash. Then with a pair of scissors, I very carefully removed the fronds behind the frog to expose the identity of the attacker. There, gobbling up the frog’s leg with the precision of an alien monster was no more than… a cricket nymph! I knew frogs ate spiders, grasshoppers, crickets and even young praying mantises, but this was a total turnaround on any known cricket behaviour.

This preyhas become a predator! The frog-eating cricket, Paragryllacris combusta, is a nocturnal carnivore actively hunting down smaller insects (or so it was once thought). It has extremely long sensory antennae, which it sometimes uses in an exploratory way to touch its prey. This gives the cricket a way to gauge the size of the prey and the striking distance, without warning of its presence. In its approach to hunting frogs, the frog-hunting cricket captures its prey by cunning and stealth comparable to any of the higher and “more intelligent” vertebrate mammals, and it does it at night! The frog-hunting cricket never makes a direct approach; it carefully manipulates from behind a branch, or between the gaps in fronds, grass roots, stems or branches.

Once it locates its prey, it manoeuvres into the best position, always out of sight. Then from behind its innocent vegetative “blind” (humans originally learnt most of their early hunting skills from other natural ambush predators), it tickles the frog with its antennae until the frog moves its position. The cricket is then able to reach through and encourage the frog to surrender its back leg to be slowly pulled out from under its body.

When the cricket has the frog’s stretched-out back leg between fronds, around grass stems or under its “blind”, the captured leg acts as a lever, preventing the frog’s escape. As the cricket eats its way up the leg from the foot, it reaches through the gap in the fronds, pulling the frog closer with its two needle-pointed front claws while hanging onto the vegetation with its other leg claws. There is no escape for the hapless frog; it is partially eaten alive. Once its appetite is satiated, the cricket shows no more interest in the prey. It just cleans its mandibles, preens and goes on its way – dinnertime is over. The reason it only eats one or two legs, or just the intestines, is its size. Once its stomach is full, it cannot eat anymore. So much for “French people”; mystery solved!