Differential Grasshopper

Early last autumn I met this Differential Grasshopper. With pretty good size and vivid green coloring, these guys are fairly photogenic. Because they eat grains and other plants, they can be damaging to agriculture, but in our meadows they're a good food source for many of our birds.

While many insects (most famously butterflies) undergo complete metamorphosis to transition from larvae to adults, grasshoppers are insects that have a different strategy. They hatch looking like tiny wingless adults, and then go through 5 molts, each time getting closer to the size/functionality of adults. They share this incomplete metamorphosis strategy with close relatives like katydids and crickets along with several other more distantly related insects like mantises, dragonflies, and damselflies.

September 25, 2021 at Duke Farms
Photo 168288306, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)

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