If you like chartreuse, you’ll love this bug.
It’s a grasshopper nymph. Grasshoppers hatch from eggs, and cast off their exoskeleton time and again before they become adults.
All of the little grasshoppers are called nymphs, but when you get more precise a nymph goes through five different instars before it becomes an adult. You can tell from the wing size that this is the fourth instar–the wings are present, but don’t extend beyond the second abdominal section.
Locusts and grasshoppers differ only in density: when grasshoppers swarm, they become locusts. There are over a hundred types of grasshoppers in Colorado, and I didn’t identify this one. I can be certain it’s not a Rocky Mountain locust, though, because North America’s only swarming locust was extinct by the early 1900s.
Like the passenger pigeon and the buffalo, Rocky Mountain locusts were once among the most successful creatures on the continent. They would periodically swarm and sweep out of their breeding grounds in Rockies onto the Plains.
This 1880 map shows the permanent breeding grounds as the cross-hatched area, while the dotted area is their temporary range. They were fierce. A swarm described by Laura Ingalls in her book <On the Banks of Plum Creek> had them eating everything down to the tool handles, and in 1874 entomologists recorded a swarm that covered 198,000 square miles. The Guinness Book of World Records still cites this as the ‘greatest concentration of animals’ in the world, containing at least 12.5 trillion individuals and weighing 27.5 million tons. Less than 30 years later, the species was extinct.
No one really knows why the Rocky Mountain locust disappeared, but it is usually chalked up to grazing and agriculture. It is said to be the only time in the history of agriculture that an endemic pest species has gone extinct.
We can surely agree that the grasshopper nymph has its charms–it’s a great shade of green. Can’t say I’m sorry about losing that Rocky Mountain locust, though.
]
Recent Comments