50 Fun Facts About Grasshopper

Grasshoppers belong to which insect suborder?

The name is Latin for 'chisel-bearing', after the shape of the female's ovipositor; crickets and katydids form the sister suborder Ensifera.

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

The name comes from the Greek for 'straight wings'; the order holds more than 20,000 species.

Grasshoppers date back to roughly when?

That makes them possibly the oldest living group of chewing plant-eating insects.

Where is a grasshopper's hearing organ located?

The tympanal organs sit on the first abdominal segment, tucked under the wings; crickets and katydids keep theirs elsewhere.

A young grasshopper nymph goes through how many moults before adulthood?

As hemimetabolous insects they skip the pupal stage and simply grow more adult-like at each moult.

What is the study of grasshoppers called?

It is named after the main family of grasshoppers and locusts, whose name in turn comes from the Greek akris, a locust.

Roughly how many known species of grasshopper are there?

They fall into some 2,400 genera, most of them tropical, and many more probably await description in rainforests.

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

That is roughly 20 body lengths, with acceleration peaking around 20 g.

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

Energy is stored in the stiff cuticle of the hind leg like a drawn bow, then released all at once.

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

This is stridulation, mostly by males courting females; the crackling forest grasshopper instead clicks in flight, called crepitation.

Which sensory feature distinguishes crickets and katydids from grasshoppers?

Ensiferan antennae can exceed the body length with 20 to 24 segments; grasshopper antennae are shorter and stouter.

The leathery, narrow forewings of a grasshopper are called what?

The large membranous hindwings underneath do the flying; many species flash bright hindwing colours to startle predators.

Some grasshoppers digest plant cell walls with the help of which enzyme?

Carbohydrates are handled mainly in the crop and proteins in the midgut ceca; swarming locusts also turn cannibal.

Which unusual family of grasshoppers is nocturnal and can swim or skate on water?

The Lentulids are wingless and the African Pneumoridae have males with inflated abdomens.

Which parasitic worms make grasshoppers leap into water and drown?

The next stage of the worm's life cycle is aquatic, so it steers the host to a pond and swims out of the corpse.

Why does the fungus Beauveria bassiana usually fail to kill grasshoppers?

The insects sunbathe as a fever, cooking the infection; a different fungus, Metarhizium acridum, is used as a locust biopesticide.

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

Experiments with the little striped whiptail lizard confirmed it is genuinely aposematic; the sluggish red-bellied Dictyophorus is another.

What triggers a solitary grasshopper to become a swarming locust?

Several contacts a minute over a short period raise serotonin levels and switch on the gregarious phase.

Locusts are the swarming phase of certain grasshoppers in which family?

Swarming is a response to overcrowding, and it happens on every continent except Antarctica.

The largest swarm ever recorded, in 1875, was formed by a now-extinct species from which region?

It was 2,900 km long and 180 km wide, with one estimate of 3.5 trillion insects; the species was gone within 30 years.

In which year was the last specimen of the Rocky Mountain locust collected?

Ploughing of the river-valley breeding grounds during the gold rush is the leading theory for why it vanished.

Preserved Rocky Mountain locusts have been found frozen in what?

So many were entombed in one Montana ice field that it is called Grasshopper Glacier.

An adult desert locust eats roughly how much plant material a day?

That is about its own body weight, and a swarm can hold 40 to 80 million insects per square kilometre.

A desert locust swarm can travel how far in a single day?

They ride the prevailing wind and stay below about 2,000 metres, where it gets too cold.

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

It is the eighth of the ten plagues; the Quran also mentions locust plagues, and Livy recorded one at Capua in 203 BC.

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

Ancient Jewish sources treated grasshoppers as a luxury food, and Yemeni and North African Jewish communities kept eating them.

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

Fried grasshoppers are also a delicacy in Uganda and in Indonesia's Gunung Kidul, where they are called walang goreng.

Which Native American people burned grassland to herd grasshoppers into pits for food?

The Ohlone lived around what is now the San Francisco Bay Area.

In Aesop's original fable, the idle insect that sings all summer was not a grasshopper but what?

Latin and Romance translations kept the cicada; La Fontaine's ironic French version turned the story into a debate about charity.

Which Russian writer used 'grasshopper' for a woman who hops from man to man in the 1892 story Poprygunya?

Jerry Paris's 1969 film The Grasshopper used the same metaphor, and Somerset Maugham reworked Aesop's fable in a short story.

In Pixar's A Bug's Life, the villainous gang of grasshoppers is led by which character?

Kevin Spacey agreed to voice him after meeting John Lasseter at the 1995 Academy Awards; the plot began as a riff on Aesop.

In the 1970s TV series Kung Fu, Master Po calls his young student Caine by what nickname?

It came from a lesson about noticing the world, including the insect at Caine's feet; David Carradine played the adult Caine.

The grasshopper cocktail gets its green colour and mint flavour from which liqueur?

Equal parts with white crème de cacao and cream; Tujague's in New Orleans claims it was invented there in 1918, and Wisconsin blends it with ice cream.

During the Greek Archaic era, the grasshopper was the symbol of which city-state?

Native citizens wore golden grasshopper brooches to show pure local ancestry, and Peisistratus hung one before the Acropolis as a charm.

A gilded grasshopper dating from 1563 hangs on Lombard Street in London as the emblem of which financier?

The Guardian Royal Exchange declined to adopt the symbol for fear people would confuse it with a locust.

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

The Egyptian word for locust was written snhm in hieroglyphs, and the insect appears on tomb carvings.

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

Sensor backpacks read the antennal lobes; seven grasshoppers together scored 80% accuracy against 60% for one.

The 1957 film Beginning of the End portrayed giant grasshoppers attacking which city?

The insects were filmed crawling over photographs of buildings, a low-budget trick still mocked by fans.

The Piper L-4 and Aeronca L-3 light aircraft of World War II were nicknamed what?

A general reportedly watched a Piper make a bouncy landing and said it looked like the insect.

The common name katydid imitates what?

The 'ka-ty-did' call belongs to the North American true katydid; the family has over 8,000 species and is also called bush crickets.

Crickets hear through tympana located where?

Grasshoppers keep their eardrums much further back on the body, one of the easy ways to tell the two apart.

Which weather pattern tends to trigger grasshopper population explosions?

They bask and thrive in warm sun; mild winters that let nymphs survive make it worse, while cloudy spells slow their development.

Grasshopper beam engines, patented by William Freemantle in 1803, got their name from what?

The beam was pivoted at one end, so the horizontal arm rose and fell like the insect's leg.

In the 1966-69 desert locust plague, numbers multiplied how many times over two generations, from two billion?

Numbers went from two billion to 30 billion; oddly, the area they covered shrank from over 100,000 to 5,000 square kilometres as they packed tighter.

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

He was studying migratory locusts in the Caucasus, whose two phases had been mistaken for separate species, and helped found the Anti-Locust Research Centre.

Albert's swarm of Rocky Mountain locusts in 1875 was estimated to contain how many insects?

It covered some 198,000 square miles, larger than California, and was estimated to weigh 27.5 million tons.

Which Roman historian recorded a devastating locust plague at Capua in 203 BC?

He linked human epidemics that followed to the stench of the rotting insects, an association that persisted for centuries.

Per unit of fodder, how does the edible protein yield of locusts compare with that of cattle?

They also produce lower levels of greenhouse gases and are usually eaten fried, smoked or dried.

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

They are also a fried delicacy in Uganda and sold on skewers in some Chinese food markets.

Which swarming species, Chortoicetes terminifera, plagues Australia?

Locusts swarm on every continent except Antarctica; Australia runs its own Plague Locust Commission to forecast outbreaks.