Grasshoppers with butterfly wings
Insects of Alberta - Black-winged Grasshopper
Insects of Alberta - Black-winged Grasshopper| Black-winged Grasshopper - Adult | |||||||
| Location: Aldersyde, AB Date: Aug. 7, 2010 | |||||||
| Photo 1 | |||||||
|
|
|
||||||
| Photos: | |||||||
| All content in this website is copyright R. Bercha, unless otherwise indicated. Unauthorized use, duplication or publication prohibited without permission | |||||||
Economically the Black-winged Grasshopper is not a significant pest, causing minor damage to tobacco, cereals, grasses and alfalfa crops. (Vickery and Kevan, 1985)Carolina Locust (Family Acrididae) - Field Station
Howdy, BugFans,
Grasshoppers (order Orthoptera—straight-wing) have four wings; the leathery first or top pair shelters the second pair—the flying wings.
They practice Simple/Incomplete Metamorphosis, adding size and a few body parts as they grow (and females tend to grow larger than males do). The gray immature locust has wing buds that will develop into wings after a few more molts. They don’t have a resting stage or an ugly duckling-to-swan transformation. Locusts belong to the family Acrididae, the short-horned (short antennae) grasshoppers, which comprises about 650 species in North America and includes grasshoppers with colorful wings and others that are flightless.
Carolina Locusts
Carolina Locusts belong to the Band-winged Grasshoppers subfamily. Grasses, herbaceous plants, sometimes beans are their preferred diet.
The BugLady has always enjoyed the courtship antics of the Carolina locust. Rising up from a weedy field, lawn, vacant lot, or dusty dirt road, a male gains about 3’ in altitude and then “hovers” for a moment, twitching and clicking, before dropping to earth again. Elliot and Hershberger, in
Songs of the Insects (which includes a CD) calls this crepitating—“producing a crackling series of snaps or clicks as they take flight or as they hover or fly in a butterfly-like fashion during courtship.
” To create the sound effects, males pop taut membranes between their wing veins; this attracts both females and rival males, who then duke it out (via a series of power leg lifts) for the favors of the fair maiden. Carolina locusts may also stridulate softly (rub together rough spots on their wings) when they are perched.
Carolina locusts come in tans through rusty browns (note the difference in color in the couple that is exchanging bodily fluids). As a group, Band-winged grasshoppers are conspicuous in flight due to their color-banded flying wings (because of their dark wings edged with cream, Carolina locusts are sometimes mistaken for Mourning Cloak butterflies), but they are awesomely camouflaged at rest. In The Handy Bug Answer Book, Dr. Gilbert Waldbauer refers to these unexpected wing patterns as “flash colors” which, sometimes in concert with flight noises, attract/distract a predator. When the grasshopper lands and tucks in its flying wings, the pursuing predator suddenly can’t find anything that matches its search image.
This immature locust was photographed in the dry-sand zone of a Lake Michigan beach; it matches both color and texture of its habitat. Eric R. Eaton and Kenn Kaufman, in the Field Guide to Insects of North America report that when standing on hot surfaces, locusts lift alternate feet to keep from scorching.
Most BugFans have seen, in Dances with Wolves or in a similar account of the lives of the Plains Indians, a reenactment of a bison drive. Many of the same tribes that chased large hunks of protein across the prairies on horseback also arranged locust drives. We Westerners are pretty snooty about using this source of free protein, but people worldwide tuck into all manner of grubs and locusts and caterpillars with gusto.
The BugLady
He's not your locust! Heavy everyday life of a gray grasshopper / Habr
Does not correspond to Habr's theme! Low technical level material!The author of the community PHANEROZOSE : Biotechnologist, Lyudmila Higerovich 9000 Editor: The inspirer of the community Fanerosa, 9,000,000
We ask all people who believe that Habr is only for those who write articles about programs, such as the person in the screenshot, please read the administration's opinion on this matter in the comments under our article on horseflies.
If this does not satisfy you, then please do not waste your time reading this article!
This article is absolutely consistent with the topics of those hubs in which this article is located and the complexity of the technical material that these hubs require from the article. It is better to go straight to reading other materials that match your consumer preferences. I will reveal to you the truth of the captain: the habr tape is configured the way you want! If you don’t like our articles, read the hubs where they write exclusively on IT! Do not spoil your mood, respect the opinions of others and have a nice day! Live together!
Sometimes in life we encounter misunderstandings when we meet strangers by their clothes and choose books by their cover. The same thing happens with the animal world. No, today's post is not about mimicry - you can read about it here. Today we will talk about one of the most underestimated and prejudiced insects - the gray grasshopper.
Honey, isn't it? I think a lot of people used to catch insects in the grass as children.
Butterflies and grasshoppers are especially favorite targets for children. And if butterflies attract with their bright colors, then hunting for grasshoppers - with its complexity and special skills. It was especially “honorable” to get a grasshopper right during the jump.
Moreover, there was also a gradation of difficulty: small gray and green jumpers that rarely fly and prefer to jump into the loose - easy prey, loud, but cautious crickets - of medium difficulty, and large and, moreover, biting huge green monsters that can flying and perfectly hiding from children's eyes - a reason for pride is almost as honorable as the emperor dragonfly.
Green grasshopper. Photo: Julia VtyurinaSpeaking of giants!
Both green and gray grasshoppers are very large (+-4 cm on average) and noisy arthropods. But adults are more interested in the practical side. So, grasshoppers, as a rule, are not pests, and locusts, on the contrary, being large insects, similar to grasshoppers, are an economically dangerous pest, especially during periods of mass reproduction (once every 8-10 years).
During this period, the locust destroys up to 100% of the crop and, in general, all the greenery in its path. So, especially in the south of the country, locusts are not a welcome guest.
However, how well people remember the appearance of a locust, they know just as poorly how it differs from a grasshopper. Clarity sometimes does not bring and access to the Internet.
Internet content is too often created by the least competent people. Because of such names, any entomologist will catch a burning attack, and the average layman is unlikely to open the link to read in full.So how do you tell one from the other?
For ease of identification, here are three signs that everyone can see and notice: the length of the wings, the antennae and the presence of an ovipositor. You can talk for a long time about the shape of the saddle (dorsal plate), the position of the legs and segmentation, but for this you will have to catch the insect, and at the same time spend at least a month studying species differences.
The most important difference is the ovipositor and well-developed anal appendages (spiky cerci). Some mistakenly believe that the “saber” is a sign of locusts (apparently, the association with danger or the steppe tribes of nomadic devastators works). But no, the saber and cerci are what distinguishes female long-horned orthopterans, in particular, true grasshoppers, from other varieties.
Meet the gray grasshopper!
The full “address” of the gray grasshopper in the taxonomic system now looks like this:
-
Kingdom: Animals ( Animalia )
-
Type: arthropod
-
Grade
-
) Orthoptera Orthoptera or Saltatoria )
-
Suborder: Orthoptera
- Pamagity!!
Like all grasshoppers, grays love to sing.
However, unlike the green and singing grasshopper, their voice is not very pleasant and rather quiet. Sometimes, passing by tall grass, you can hear a quiet and unobtrusive "skr-skr, skr-skr". This is the "voice" of the gray grasshopper - the rustling of the stridulatory apparatus of the elytra. Stridulation is a special property of a number of insects that allows them to make characteristic sounds. The stridulatory apparatus of grasshoppers consists of modified rear parts of the elytra of males. The left wing always lies on top of the right. On the left elytron there is a stridulatory vein with serrations, scraping the right elytron with a mirror - a "window" covered with a membrane that plays the role of a resonator. The structure of this apparatus is one of the species features.
The diet of the gray grasshopper is also not very up to expectations - the basis of its diet is ... other insects. And if the locust primarily eats plant foods, and only occasionally eats meat, then the gray grasshopper prefers to first hunt aphids, caterpillars and wireworms, and then switches to a side dish in the form of juicy buds and shoots.
From what to get animal proteins is not a particularly fundamental question. A motley grasshopper will bite both a brother crushed by a machine and a second-generation cub. Photo: Shinkarenko Stanislav
It becomes all the more insulting for the confusion and extermination of gray grasshoppers - by predation, they reduce the population of pests, including especially dangerous scoops and moths, locusts, thrips, wireworms (larvae of click beetles), aphids and other small insects, as well as spider mites.
Significance and fate of the gray grasshopper
The gray grasshopper is an excellent regulator of the abundance of many arthropod populations. In addition, it is a very nutritious food for larger predators - lizards, birds and even cats do not deny themselves the pleasure of catching and eating a fat grasshopper. And although during the years of mass reproduction, grasshoppers can stray into flocks and cause damage to cultivated plants, the scale of damage and the number of swarms still do not correspond to a small proportion of those in locusts.
However, the gray grasshopper has recently moved out of its natural habitat and is listed as endangered in some regions. Medieval healers and alchemists of modern times also played an important role in this. The Latin name of the species is verrucivorus - means "warty". The fact is that in ancient times people believed in the healing properties of grasshoppers. Some squeezed brown drops of digestive fluid from the mouth out of the unfortunate and applied it to acne and fistulas, others fixed the grasshopper over a wart or wound, waiting for the unfortunate insect to eat it. Sometimes after that, the entrails from the abdomen were squeezed out into place of the sores, and sometimes whole lappings were prepared from dried insects. Yes, digestive juices had some antiseptic effect (like human saliva), but in terms of efficiency and safety they were much inferior even to vinegar poultices, not to mention modern remedies.
And they were eaten long before the spread of myths about Asian cuisine in Europe.
The famous expression "honey and locusts" came from a specific monastic diet, which included grasshoppers fried or baked in honey (the Greek word "locust" itself meant many insects, but was associated mainly with grasshoppers). In addition, slash-and-burn agriculture also made a great contribution to the reduction in the number of grasshoppers - grasshoppers lay their eggs shallowly in moist soil. Yes, and the massive plowing of land in the 20th century, coupled with tons of applied broad-spectrum pesticides, significantly reduced the populations of many insects. Sometimes aiming at the locust, a person endures the population and the grasshopper without worrying too much about the ethical side of the issue. In addition, there are a number of grasshopper-specific diseases that fairly thin out the number of young individuals. And in general, with abundant offspring, hardly 20% survive to adulthood. Well, let's not talk about sad things, because for the most part the species is still widespread!
SourcesWell, today you have learned a little more, and hopefully you have learned to tell the difference between grasshoppers and locusts.
Perhaps you will recognize them when you meet and save a couple more individuals. Good luck and don't get sick!
Zhang, Hong-Li; Huang, Yuan; Lin, Li-Liang; Wang, Xiao-Yang; Zheng, Zhe-Min (2013). "The phylogeny of the Orthoptera (Insecta) as deduced from mitogenomic gene sequences". Zoological studies. 52:37.
"Grasshopper | Description, Features, & Species". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 29September 2021.
Brock, Sebastian. "St John the Baptist's diet - according to some early Eastern Christian sources". St John's College, Oxford. Archived from the original on 24 September 2015. Retrieved 4 May 2015.
Smirnova T.P. "Orthoptera (Orthoptera) of natural and anthropogenic biocenoses of Belarus". Minsk, 1996
http://entomology.ru/orthoptera/key.html
https://givotniymir.ru/vidy-kuznechikov-opisaniya-nazvaniya-i-osobennosti-vidov-kuznechikov/
https://zooclub.org.
ua/bespozvonochnye/14995-kuznechik-seryj.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuRv1WL62d4
9017 www.zoofirma.ru/nasekomye/chlenistonogie-srednej-polosy-rossii/1743-kuznechik-seryj-decticus-verrucivorus.html
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper_gray
What are insects
Fascinating online tasks about nature and the world
Summer is the season when a child encounters different insects at every step. Tell him about them!How insects are similar to each other
Insects accompany us everywhere: they fly into the house, bite, eat food and clothes, damage crops, or simply circle above us in the air. There are over one million species of insects, making them the most numerous animal class.
The world of insects is diverse. But all insects are united by the following distinctive features:
- all insects have a chitinous shell that acts as a skeleton;
- the body of insects consists of three parts: head, chest and abdomen;
- all insects have a pair of antennae on the head;
- they have six legs (arachnids have eight legs).
How insects are different
Insects need food and water. Some insects feed on plants (roots, stems, leaves), seeds, fruits, the second (predatory insects) feed on other insects. Predatory insects are dragonfly, grasshopper, ladybug.
Ladybug , which is easily recognizable by its solid body with colored patches, feeds on aphids and other plant pests. This beetle most likely received the name “cow” due to the fact that it resembles a cow in color and, in case of danger, secretes yellowish “milk” from the knee joints, and “God's” - because of its harmlessness to humans. Children mistakenly believe that you can tell the age of a ladybug by counting the spots on the wings. But it's not. The color of the wings and spots remain unchanged throughout the adult life of the insect. But a different number of spots formed the basis for the selection of different types of these beetles.
Grasshopper is easily recognizable by its large hind legs.
He eats plant and animal food. Grasshoppers make a characteristic sound due to a special vein on the wings, which he leads like a bow. Grasshoppers are similar to crickets but have shorter antennae than crickets. Grasshoppers make jumps that are 20 times their body length. Do the developmental exercises from Aikyusha
Most insects have wings and can fly. Some insects fly silently (butterflies), while other insects make a special sound during the flight - buzzing. These are "loud" insects (flies, bees, wasps, mosquitoes). When flying, insects flap their wings several hundred times per second, thereby generating sounds. Unlike butterflies, mosquitoes and bees do not make one wing flap per second, but hundreds or thousands of flaps. Small insects (mosquitoes, bees) flap their wings often, so the sound they make is like a thin buzz. Bumblebees, beetles make fewer wing beats per second and make a more muffled sound.
Butterfly is one of the most beautiful insects.
Butterflies feed on the sweet nectar of flowers and are an adornment of nature. One of the distinguishing features of butterflies is their bright and colorful wings. But these wings are very delicate. Don't touch them or you might ruin them and the butterflies won't be able to fly. Insects can be harmful (a fly carries microbes, a mosquito bites a person, beetles destroy garden plants) and useful (butterflies and bees pollinate flowers, bees provide honey and wax, ants carry seeds of many plants through the forest).
Bees are the first insects from which man began to benefit. Bees live in large families. A bee colony consists of worker bees, drones and a queen bee. Each bee has a stinger on its body. Children are sometimes afraid of bees because they think the insects will attack them. Indeed, they can sting people, but this only happens when they feel threatened and defend themselves. After a sting, the bee dies: the sting remains inside the victim, and the bee cannot live without it.
Learn more
