47 Fun Facts About Grasshopper

Which company's 'Grasshopper' test rocket made short hops and landed back on its legs in 2012 and 2013?

SpaceX. Its Grasshopper rig rose, hovered and settled back on its landing legs at a Texas test pad, rehearsing the booster landings that later made Falcon 9 rockets reusable.

Grasshoppers, locusts and crickets all belong to which insect order?

Orthoptera. The name comes from the Greek for 'straight wings', and the order once also took in cockroaches and mantises, which were later split off from it.

The oldest grasshopper fossils date from roughly when?

Before the first dinosaurs. The oldest known grasshopper fossils are about 250 million years old, so the group saw the dinosaurs arrive and was still around when their reign ended.

Where is a grasshopper's hearing organ located?

On the abdomen. A simple eardrum sits on each side of the first belly segment, tucked under the wings, so a female can listen for a male's courtship calls.

Butterflies and beetles pass through which life stage that grasshoppers skip entirely?

Pupa. A grasshopper hatches as a wingless miniature of its parents, called a nymph, and simply moults its way up to adult size with no resting stage in between.

Which Roald Dahl book counts a cultured Old-Green-Grasshopper among its young hero's travelling companions?

James and the Giant Peach. The Old-Green-Grasshopper plays for his shipmates like a violinist as the peach crosses the Atlantic, and ends the story as a professional musician in New York.

Grasshoppers have no lungs and breathe through rows of small holes along their bodies called what?

Spiracles. Each valved hole feeds a network of air tubes that pipes oxygen straight to the cells, so a grasshopper's blood has little part in carrying it.

A large grasshopper such as a locust can jump how far without using its wings?

Roughly 1 metre. That is about 20 times its body length, so a person who could match it would clear some 40 metres from a standing start.

How do grasshoppers generate more jumping power than their muscles alone could produce?

A catapult mechanism in the legs. Muscle slowly bends stiff cuticle in each hind leg like a drawn bow, then a catch lets go and the stored energy fires the leg far faster than muscle could.

Singing grasshoppers usually make their sound by rubbing pegs on their hind legs against what?

The edges of the forewings. The rasping is called stridulation, and it is mostly the males that do it, switching to a special courtship tune when a female comes near.

Which sensory feature distinguishes crickets and katydids from grasshoppers?

Much longer antennae. A katydid's can outstretch its whole body, which is why katydids were once called long-horned grasshoppers and true grasshoppers short-horned ones.

Where do most female grasshoppers lay their eggs?

In the soil. The female digs a hole and lays a pod of eggs in a froth that hardens around them, and in cooler climates they sit out the winter there.

Some grasshoppers soften tough plant fibre in their gut with the help of which enzyme?

Cellulase. It breaks open the walls around a plant's cells so other digestive enzymes can reach the contents, and Carolina grasshoppers showed more of it than most insect groups tested.

Grasshoppers mostly eat plants, but young desert locusts marching in crowded bands also eat what?

Each other. In a marching band every young locust risks a bite from the one behind, so each keeps walking to stay ahead, a forced march that drives the whole band forward.

Which parasitic worms make grasshoppers leap into water and drown?

Hairworms (Spinochordodes). The adult worm breeds in water, and it appears to make proteins mimicking the insect's own that act on its nervous system until the host jumps in, letting the worm wriggle free.

Why do grasshoppers usually survive the fungus Beauveria bassiana?

Sunbathing heats them past what it tolerates. The basking works like a fever that holds the fungus back without curing it: in lab tests it took over as soon as infected locusts were kept out of the heat.

The rainbow or painted grasshopper of Arizona uses bright colours for what purpose?

Warning predators it is toxic. The colours are no bluff: in experiments, whiptail lizards that hunt grasshoppers tended to avoid the rainbow grasshopper.

What triggers a solitary grasshopper to become a swarming locust?

Repeated touching of its hind legs. Being jostled in a crowd raises serotonin in the insect's nervous system, and that turns a shy loner into one that seeks out company.

Which children's author described locusts devouring her family's Minnesota wheat crop in the 1870s?

Laura Ingalls Wilder. In On the Banks of Plum Creek the swarm strips the wheat that was meant to pay for the family's new house, and Pa has to walk far to the east to find work on other farms.

Preserved Rocky Mountain locusts have been recovered from what?

Glaciers in Wyoming and Montana. So many were entombed in one Montana ice field that it is called Grasshopper Glacier, and 400-year-old remains from Wyoming ice have since yielded DNA.

Each day an adult desert locust can eat food equal to what?

Its own weight. That is only about two grams, but a swarm covering a single square kilometre is reckoned to eat as much in a day as 35,000 people.

Desert locust swarms can cover over 100 km a day by flying mainly in which direction?

With the wind. Swarms fly by day and let the moving air carry them, which is how they regularly cross the Red Sea between Africa and Arabia.

A devastating locust plague in Egypt is described in which book of the Bible?

Exodus. The locusts are the eighth of the ten plagues, sent to eat whatever the hail before them had left, and once Pharaoh pleads for relief they are swept into the Red Sea.

Which biblical figure is recorded as eating locusts and wild honey in the wilderness?

John the Baptist. The Gospel's Greek word, akrides, plainly means the insects, though some readers took it to mean carob pods, and carob is still known as St John's bread.

In southern Mexico, grasshoppers eaten in tortillas with chilli sauce are known as what?

Chapulines. Toasted with garlic, lime and chilli, they are a ballgame snack in Oaxaca, and in 2017 a stand selling them became the surprise hit of Seattle Mariners home games.

Which United Nations agency runs Locust Watch, the service that tracks and forecasts desert locust swarms?

The Food and Agriculture Organization. From Rome it pools field reports, satellite images and weather data to forecast where swarms will breed and move up to six weeks ahead.

In Aesop's original Greek fable, the idle grasshopper of English versions was which other insect?

A cicada. Latin and French versions kept it, which is why generations of French schoolchildren have learned La Fontaine's retelling as La Cigale et la Fourmi, the cicada and the ant.

Which Russian writer cast an unfaithful society wife as 'The Grasshopper' in his 1892 story Poprygunya?

Anton Chekhov. Moscow took the heroine and her painter lover for real people, and the painter, Isaac Levitan, considered challenging him to a duel and broke with him for nearly three years.

Which animated film pits ants against a grasshopper gang led by Hopper?

A Bug's Life. Kevin Spacey voices Hopper, the grasshopper boss who tells his gang that the ants far outnumber them and must be kept in line before they work it out.

Which actor starred as Caine, the monk whose blind teacher called him 'Grasshopper', in the 1970s series Kung Fu?

David Carradine. Master Po coined the nickname in a lesson on awareness, after the boy Caine failed to notice the grasshopper sitting at his own feet.

The grasshopper cocktail gets its green colour from which liqueur?

Crème de menthe. It is shaken with equal parts white crème de cacao and cream, and Tujague's, one of the oldest bars in New Orleans, claims to have introduced the drink to the world.

In Thucydides' history, rich old men of which Greek city once knotted their hair with golden grasshoppers?

Athens. The ornaments were a boast of pure local descent: Athenians claimed their people had sprung from the earth of Attica and had never lived anywhere else.

A gilded grasshopper hangs above Lombard Street in London as the emblem of which financier?

Sir Thomas Gresham. The grasshopper was his family crest, and another still swings as the weathervane above the Royal Exchange, the merchants' meeting place he founded in Elizabethan London.

Which pharaoh compared the Hittite armies to locusts covering the mountains and valleys?

Ramesses II. The line comes from his inscriptions on the Battle of Kadesh, where the Hittites ambushed and surrounded him before he fought his way out; the outcome is considered a stalemate.

In 2020, Washington University researchers built 'cyborg grasshoppers' to detect what?

Explosives. Electrodes read the smell centres of the insects' own brains, and later tests showed the bugs could even tell one explosive's scent from another.

In the 1957 B-movie Beginning of the End, giant grasshoppers descend on which Midwestern city?

Chicago. The swarm grows monstrous after feasting on giant vegetables that a scientist, played by Peter Graves, has raised with radiation in rural Illinois.

Which famous American light plane went to war as the L-4 'Grasshopper', spotting targets for the artillery?

Piper Cub. Some went well beyond spotting: Major Charles 'Bazooka Charlie' Carpenter strapped six bazookas to his L-4 and was credited with knocking out several German tanks.

The common name katydid imitates what?

The insect's three-pulse song. Only the male makes the rasping 'ka-ty-did', by vibrating its wings, and on summer nights in the eastern United States neighbours answer one another in turn.

Crickets hear through eardrums located where?

On the front legs. The two ears sit just below the knees and are linked by an air tube running through the body, and a female uses the pair to home in on a singing male.

Which weather pattern tends to trigger grasshopper population explosions?

Several successive dry seasons. Warm, sunny weather speeds the young grasshoppers' growth, while cold, wet spells kill new hatchlings and spread the fungal disease that keeps numbers down.

The 'grasshopper' engines of the early steam age got their name from what?

Their leg-like beam. The rocking beam was pivoted at one end instead of the middle, so it rose and fell at an angle like a grasshopper's hind leg.

A gold-plated clock topped by a time-eating grasshopper called the Chronophage stands in which English university city?

Cambridge. Stephen Hawking unveiled the Corpus Clock in 2008; its monster is the working escapement, built as a tribute to the 'grasshopper' mechanism invented by clockmaker John Harrison.

Which Russian-born entomologist first described the solitary and gregarious phases of locusts?

Boris Uvarov. He showed that two supposed species of migratory locust were one insect in two guises, loner and swarmer, and went on to lead London's Anti-Locust Research Centre.

How did Albert Child measure the record locust swarm that crossed Nebraska in 1875?

Timing its passage. He multiplied the swarm's speed by the time it took to pass overhead and put its extent at about 198,000 square miles, bigger than California.

Which Roman historian recorded an immense swarm of locusts covering the country round Capua in 203 BC?

Livy. He lists the swarm among that year's frightening omens, alongside crows eating gold on the Capitol and a foal born with five feet, noting that no one knew where the locusts had come from.

A grasshopper weathervane made in 1742 still tops which Boston landmark?

Faneuil Hall. Shem Drowne made the vane, and one theory is that he modelled it on the grasshopper weathervane that tops the Royal Exchange in London.

Fried grasshoppers called walang goreng are eaten in the Gunung Kidul Regency of which country?

Indonesia. Gunung Kidul sits on Java's limestone uplands, where land too poor for rice pushed farmers to cassava, and the fried grasshoppers count among its signature dishes.