| from the July 7, 2008 Newsletter, issued from near
Natchez, Mississippi: LILLIPUTIAN RAINBOW UNICORN That's the name automatically coming to mind the other day when a tiny creature floated down through the air from a tree above me and settled onto my arm-hairs where it began tickling me as it wandered about. You can see what it was, with a close-up at the top right, above. Except maybe among tropical coral reefs, have you ever seen such a colorful, delicate, retiring-looking little critter? Its body was maybe half an inch long. But, what was it? With those long back legs obviously it was a grasshopper or something closely related. Notice that it bears no wings. Since species in the Grasshopper Order, the Orthoptera, undergo simple metamorphosis, the immature stage is referred to as a nymph, so this is clearly the nymphal stage of some orthopterous species. In the end, with help from BugGuide.Net, I found that I had a Bush Katydid nymph, genus Scudderia. Probably it's the common SCUDDERIA FURCATA, the Fork-tailed Bush Katydid, distributed throughout most of the US wherever bushes and trees are found. You can see a mature female at http://bugguide.net/node/view/10184. Bush Katydids eat leaves of trees and bushes and lay their eggs on or in plant tissue. Though it's probably too early to hear their songs now, if you computer eats WAV audio files, you can hear the very subtle, widely spaced "clicks" made by an adult by clicking on the speaker icons midway down the page at http://buzz.ifas.ufl.edu/063a.htm. |