#orthopteran

[vintagewildlife]

Female grasshoppers attracted to a loudspeaker playing the sound of a male grasshopper By: Pierre Boulat From: Life Nature Library: Animal Behavior 1965

[midwestkingdom]

Wow some of my favorite natural patterns and colors are that that can be found on grasshoppers! That ones colors are so perfect. The katydids are amazing too! They are impressively large.

[presidentabo]

People who make bug art/products PLEASE IM BEGGING YOU. MAKE!!! ORTHOPTERA!!!! ART!!!!. I will give you all my money!!!!!!!!

[morbidsmenagerie]

Pinhead crickets! I've been paying more attention to my feeders and really trying to optimize their care and food. It's always kind of bothered me that people have such distain for feeder insects, even among people that keep bugs. I'll be releasing a guide on what I've been doing for their feeding and care soon.

[uncharismaticmacrofauna]

How Can Grasshoppers Be Older than Grass?

I love seeing people learn for the first time just how mind-meltingly vast and ancient the arthropods are.

Grasshoppers as a group are around 250 millions years old. To put that in perspective, the first dinosaurs showed up 230 million years ago. Grass is a relative youngster and has only been around for an estimated 66 million years.

So, yes, dinosaurs are also older than grass.

What were grasshoppers (and herbivorous dinosaurs) eating before there was grass to hop on? Get ready for a very not-exciting answer; they were just eating other older plants that were not grass. Plants first took to land around 700 million years ago.

Luckily grasshoppers are not particularly picky about what they will put in their mouth-holes. Some are perfectly happy to dine on meat when it’s available, even the meat of other grasshoppers. The evolutionary pitch for grasshoppers was basically “make a very hungry wood-chipper and then give it legs to throw itself at food”.

Nowadays most grasshopper species do have a preference for grass though, so this reaction is pretty accurate:

Image Credit: (1) (2) (3)

Sources for relative evolutionary ages: (1) (2) (3)

[usgsbiml]

MAGLEV impact site, this is something that takes plant carbon and converts it to bird food.  Orthopterans are famous for this and drive many ecosystems sometimes to outbreak levels, sometimes like this little Tettrigid (am basing this ID on my college taxonomy courses).    Picture by Cole Cheng

[remade3940580486940568]

🦗?

[vintagewildlife]

Great green bush cricket By: Unknown photographer From: Wildlife Fact-File 1990s