Grasshoppers, locusts, and cicadas

It's been a blast talking with the students about grasshoppers this week, in part because I remember so clearly my feelings about grasshoppers when I was their age.

In my yellow-tinged black and white snapshot memory of childhood, I'm standing in our parched backyard with grasshoppers the size of cigars jumping up against my bare legs and "spitting tobacco". I'm wearing a pleated scooter skirt with gray, yellow, and orange weiner dogs on the fabric. The grasshopper irrational childhood terror threat level was orange, just one step below the red level for moths.

A grasshopper can jump twenty times the length of its body. For a human, that's the equivalent of running the kickoff out past the forty yard line. Spitting tobacco suggests more of a pro baseball bent.

In '98 or '99 I made a giant grasshopper combining papier mache, wire sculpture, and weaving of dyed fabrics. The finished product has hung over my mantlepiece since 2000. It was good to take the grasshopper down off the hook to be a visual aid at school, because it sure needed a good dusting!



Last week we studied honeybees, dragonflies, and mosquitos. We learned that the legs and wings are attached to the thorax, and that the part we think of as a tail is actually the abdomen of an insect. Earlier this summer we studied the life cycle of the butterfly.

I admitted to the elementary students that I didn't know about cicadas as a kid. We called the droning background sound of summer, "locusts buzzing." Locusts are actually short-horned swarming grasshoppers that devour entire crops causing millions of dollars of damage every year. Cicadas are related to aphids, not to grasshoppers:

Are cicadas "locusts"? Periodical cicadas are often incorrectly called locusts. Locusts are grasshoppers, while cicadas are most closely related to aphids. The term "locust" began to be used to describe cicadas around 1715 in the English colonies, when settlers tried to make sense of the cicada emergences by equating them with the biblical plagues. Because the cicadas appeared in great numbers and were eaten by the Native Americans, just as biblical locusts appeared in great numbers and were eaten by John the Baptist, "locust" seemed a logical name for them.

The biggest mass of insects ever recorded was the 1870 swarm of locusts in Nebraska estimated to be over 10 trillion strong. I can't imagine the noise of all those grinding mandibles!

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about a grasshopper plague in one of my all-time favorite books, On the Banks of Plum Creek. My own great-great grandfather described other Nebraska infestations in a handwritten short biography. I'll try to transcribe some of it this weekend.


© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder