Grasshopper Trivia
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47 free Grasshopper trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 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 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which company's 'Grasshopper' test rocket made short hops and landed back on its legs in 2012 and 2013?
SpaceX
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.
Q 02Grasshoppers, locusts and crickets all belong to which insect order?
Orthoptera
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.
Q 03The oldest grasshopper fossils date from roughly when?
Before the first dinosaurs
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.
Q 04Where is a grasshopper's hearing organ located?
On the abdomen
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.
Q 05Butterflies and beetles pass through which life stage that grasshoppers skip entirely?
Pupa
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.
Q 06Which Roald Dahl book counts a cultured Old-Green-Grasshopper among its young hero's travelling companions?
James and the Giant Peach
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.
Q 07Grasshoppers have no lungs and breathe through rows of small holes along their bodies called what?
Spiracles
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.
Q 08A large grasshopper such as a locust can jump how far without using its wings?
Roughly 1 metre
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.
Q 09How do grasshoppers generate more jumping power than their muscles alone could produce?
A catapult mechanism in the legs
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.
Q 10Singing grasshoppers usually make their sound by rubbing pegs on their hind legs against what?
The edges of the forewings
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.
Q 11Which sensory feature distinguishes crickets and katydids from grasshoppers?
Much longer antennae
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.
Q 12Where do most female grasshoppers lay their eggs?
In the soil
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.
Q 13Some grasshoppers soften tough plant fibre in their gut with the help of which enzyme?
Cellulase
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.
Q 21Each day an adult desert locust can eat food equal to what?
Its own weight
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.
Q 22Desert locust swarms can cover over 100 km a day by flying mainly in which direction?
With the wind
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.
Q 23A devastating locust plague in Egypt is described in which book of the Bible?
Exodus
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.
Q 14Grasshoppers mostly eat plants, but young desert locusts marching in crowded bands also eat what?
Each other
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.
Q 15Which parasitic worms make grasshoppers leap into water and drown?
Hairworms (Spinochordodes)
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.
Q 16Why do grasshoppers usually survive the fungus Beauveria bassiana?
Sunbathing heats them past what it tolerates
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.
Q 17The rainbow or painted grasshopper of Arizona uses bright colours for what purpose?
Warning predators it is toxic
Warning predators it is toxic. The colours are no bluff: in experiments, whiptail lizards that hunt grasshoppers tended to avoid the rainbow grasshopper.
Q 18What triggers a solitary grasshopper to become a swarming locust?
Repeated touching of its hind legs
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.
Q 19Which children's author described locusts devouring her family's Minnesota wheat crop in the 1870s?
Laura Ingalls Wilder
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.
Q 20Preserved Rocky Mountain locusts have been recovered from what?
Glaciers in Wyoming and Montana
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.
Q 24Which biblical figure is recorded as eating locusts and wild honey in the wilderness?
John the Baptist
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.
Q 25In southern Mexico, grasshoppers eaten in tortillas with chilli sauce are known as what?
Chapulines
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.
Q 26Which United Nations agency runs Locust Watch, the service that tracks and forecasts desert locust swarms?
The Food and Agriculture Organization
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.
Q 27In Aesop's original Greek fable, the idle grasshopper of English versions was which other insect?
A cicada
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.
Q 28Which Russian writer cast an unfaithful society wife as 'The Grasshopper' in his 1892 story Poprygunya?
Anton Chekhov
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.
Q 29Which animated film pits ants against a grasshopper gang led by Hopper?
A Bug's Life
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.
Q 30Which actor starred as Caine, the monk whose blind teacher called him 'Grasshopper', in the 1970s series Kung Fu?
David Carradine
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.