50 free Grasshopper trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Grasshoppers have been chewing plants since the early Triassic, which makes them one of the oldest herbivorous insects still hopping around. This quiz covers the animal itself: why its ears are on its abdomen, how a catapult mechanism in its legs launches a locust a metre at 20 g, what a 'hopper' is, how it sings by rubbing pegs on its legs against its wings, and how to tell it from a cricket or a katydid. Then it turns to locusts, which are just grasshoppers that have been jostled into a crowd. There are questions on the serotonin trigger for swarming, the desert locust's daily appetite and range, the plagues of Exodus and John the Baptist's diet, and the Rocky Mountain locust, whose 1875 swarm was the largest animal aggregation ever recorded before the species vanished within 30 years. Culture rounds it off: chapulines in Oaxaca, Aesop's ant and grasshopper (originally a cicada), Hopper in A Bug's Life, 'Patience, Grasshopper' in Kung Fu, Gresham's gilded grasshopper in London and the mint-green cocktail. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on grasshoppers, locusts and the related species and works, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Our Insects quiz goes wider.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Grasshoppers belong to which insect suborder?
Caelifera
The name is Latin for 'chisel-bearing', after the shape of the female's ovipositor; crickets and katydids form the sister suborder Ensifera.
Q 02Grasshoppers, locusts and crickets all belong to which insect order?
Orthoptera
The name comes from the Greek for 'straight wings'; the order holds more than 20,000 species.
Q 03Grasshoppers date back to roughly when?
The early Triassic, about 250 million years ago
That makes them possibly the oldest living group of chewing plant-eating insects.
Q 04Where is a grasshopper's hearing organ located?
On the abdomen
The tympanal organs sit on the first abdominal segment, tucked under the wings; crickets and katydids keep theirs elsewhere.
Q 05A young grasshopper nymph goes through how many moults before adulthood?
Five
As hemimetabolous insects they skip the pupal stage and simply grow more adult-like at each moult.
Q 06What is the study of grasshoppers called?
Acridology
It is named after the main family of grasshoppers and locusts, whose name in turn comes from the Greek akris, a locust.
Q 07Roughly how many known species of grasshopper are there?
About 11,000
They fall into some 2,400 genera, most of them tropical, and many more probably await description in rainforests.
Q 08A large grasshopper such as a locust can jump how far without using its wings?
Roughly a metre
That is roughly 20 body lengths, with acceleration peaking around 20 g.
Q 09How do grasshoppers generate more jumping power than their muscles alone could produce?
A catapult mechanism in the legs
Energy is stored in the stiff cuticle of the hind leg like a drawn bow, then released all at once.
Q 10Most grasshoppers make sound by rubbing pegs on their hind legs against what?
The edges of the forewings
This is stridulation, mostly by males courting females; the crackling forest grasshopper instead clicks in flight, called crepitation.
Q 11Which sensory feature distinguishes crickets and katydids from grasshoppers?
Much longer antennae
Ensiferan antennae can exceed the body length with 20 to 24 segments; grasshopper antennae are shorter and stouter.
Q 12The leathery, narrow forewings of a grasshopper are called what?
Tegmina
The large membranous hindwings underneath do the flying; many species flash bright hindwing colours to startle predators.
Q 13Some grasshoppers digest plant cell walls with the help of which enzyme?
Cellulase
Carbohydrates are handled mainly in the crop and proteins in the midgut ceca; swarming locusts also turn cannibal.
Q 21In which year was the last specimen of the Rocky Mountain locust collected?
1904
Ploughing of the river-valley breeding grounds during the gold rush is the leading theory for why it vanished.
Q 22Preserved Rocky Mountain locusts have been found frozen in what?
Glaciers in Wyoming and Montana
So many were entombed in one Montana ice field that it is called Grasshopper Glacier.
Q 23An adult desert locust eats roughly how much plant material a day?
About 2 grams
That is about its own body weight, and a swarm can hold 40 to 80 million insects per square kilometre.
Q 14Which unusual family of grasshoppers is nocturnal and can swim or skate on water?
Pauliniidae
The Lentulids are wingless and the African Pneumoridae have males with inflated abdomens.
Q 15Which parasitic worms make grasshoppers leap into water and drown?
Hairworms (Spinochordodes)
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.
Q 16Why does the fungus Beauveria bassiana usually fail to kill grasshoppers?
Sunbathing heats them past what it tolerates
The insects sunbathe as a fever, cooking the infection; a different fungus, Metarhizium acridum, is used as a locust biopesticide.
Q 17The rainbow or painted grasshopper of Arizona uses bright colours for what purpose?
Warning predators it is toxic
Experiments with the little striped whiptail lizard confirmed it is genuinely aposematic; the sluggish red-bellied Dictyophorus is another.
Q 18What triggers a solitary grasshopper to become a swarming locust?
Repeated touching of its hind legs
Several contacts a minute over a short period raise serotonin levels and switch on the gregarious phase.
Q 19Locusts are the swarming phase of certain grasshoppers in which family?
Acrididae
Swarming is a response to overcrowding, and it happens on every continent except Antarctica.
Q 20The largest swarm ever recorded, in 1875, was formed by a now-extinct species from which region?
The Rocky Mountains
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.
Q 24A desert locust swarm can travel how far in a single day?
100 to 200 km
They ride the prevailing wind and stay below about 2,000 metres, where it gets too cold.
Q 25A devastating locust plague in Egypt is described in which book of the Bible?
Exodus
It is the eighth of the ten plagues; the Quran also mentions locust plagues, and Livy recorded one at Capua in 203 BC.
Q 26Which biblical figure is recorded as eating locusts and wild honey in the wilderness?
John the Baptist
Ancient Jewish sources treated grasshoppers as a luxury food, and Yemeni and North African Jewish communities kept eating them.
Q 27In southern Mexico, grasshoppers eaten in tortillas with chilli sauce are known as what?
Chapulines
Fried grasshoppers are also a delicacy in Uganda and in Indonesia's Gunung Kidul, where they are called walang goreng.
Q 28Which Native American people burned grassland to herd grasshoppers into pits for food?
The Ohlone
The Ohlone lived around what is now the San Francisco Bay Area.
Q 29In Aesop's original fable, the idle insect that sings all summer was not a grasshopper but what?
A cicada
Latin and Romance translations kept the cicada; La Fontaine's ironic French version turned the story into a debate about charity.
Q 30Which Russian writer used 'grasshopper' for a woman who hops from man to man in the 1892 story Poprygunya?
Anton Chekhov
Jerry Paris's 1969 film The Grasshopper used the same metaphor, and Somerset Maugham reworked Aesop's fable in a short story.