- Animals
- ›Arthropods
- ›Hexapods
- ›Insects
- ›Winged and Once-winged Insects
- ›True Bugs, Hoppers, Aphids, and allies
- ›True Bugs
- ›Water Bugs
- ›Nepoidea
- ›Waterscorpions
- ›Ranatrinae

Ranatra
Ranatra is a genus of generally slender predatory members of the family Nepidae, known as water scorpions or water stick-insects. Their front legs are strong and are used to grasp prey. They breathe through a pair of long breathing pipes extending from their tails. They eat tadpoles, small fish and other insects, which they pierce with their beak and inject a saliva which both sedates and begins to digest their prey.
29 branches of this genus, most-observed first

Eurasian Water Stick Insect
speciesRanatra linearis

Brown Waterscorpion
speciesRanatra fusca

Ranatra chinensis
speciesRanatra chinensis
Ranatra quadridentata
speciesRanatra quadridentata

Needle Bug
speciesRanatra dispar

Ranatra unicolor
speciesRanatra unicolor
Ranatra australis
speciesRanatra australis

Ranatra buenoi
speciesRanatra buenoi

Ranatra kirkaldyi
speciesRanatra kirkaldyi

Ranatra incisa
speciesRanatra incisa

Ranatra nigra
speciesRanatra nigra

Western Waterscorpion
speciesRanatra brevicollis

Ranatra drakei
speciesRanatra drakei

Ranatra parmata
speciesRanatra parmata

Ranatra texana
speciesRanatra texana

Ranatra longipes
speciesRanatra longipes

Ranatra annulipes
speciesRanatra annulipes

Ranatra jamaicana
speciesRanatra jamaicana

Ranatra montezuma
speciesRanatra montezuma

Ranatra tuberculifrons
speciesRanatra tuberculifrons

Ranatra obscura
speciesRanatra obscura

Ranatra macrophthalma
speciesRanatra macrophthalma

Ranatra parvipes
speciesRanatra parvipes

Ranatra insulata
speciesRanatra insulata
Ranatra elongata
speciesRanatra elongata
Ranatra gracilis
speciesRanatra gracilis

Ranatra mediana
speciesRanatra mediana
Ranatra williamsi
speciesRanatra williamsi
Ranatra diminuta
speciesRanatra diminuta
Where it lives
Recorded sightings
—
geo-referenced records in GBIF, from museums, herbaria and field observers.
Drag the globe to turn it. Dots are where records exist, not a range map; darker means more records.
In the stacks
Searching the stacks…
Every page naming Ranatra in the Biodiversity Heritage Library →
This page is assembled live from iNaturalist, GBIF, Wikipedia, the Source Library and the Internet Archive. It is not yet part of the hand-edited codex. iNaturalist taxon 119346.