326 



Marvels of Insect Life, 



a native of Europe, though it does not occur in Britain. It has a long, slender 

 body, two and a half inches in length, and leaping legs more than three inches long ; 

 but instead of the stout, squarish head of the typical grasshoppers, in this species 

 the first division of the Insect is prolonged considerably in front of the mouth in 

 a tapering form and an upward direction, as will be seen in the photographs on 



page 328. The eyes and antennae are borne near 

 the extremity of this snout-like extension. But 

 in a South American species -"^ this tendency to 

 elongation is carried to such an extreme that the 

 grasshopper might easily be mistaken for one of 

 the stick-Insects. It is six inches long and only 

 about a fifth of an inch broad. It sits among 

 withered grass, which it exactly resembles. 



Then in some species of the little grouse 

 locusts — of which we can boast two native 

 representatives, though they are not quite half 

 an inch long — we meet with remarkable disguises. 

 The British species - are quite normal grasshoppers 

 at first sight, but what we take for the wing- 

 covers extended over the hind-body is a remark- 

 able outgrowth of the fore-part of the fore-body 

 and known as a pronotum. This species is 

 shown on page 32c). In an African species^ it 

 forms a high-arched ridge extending right over 

 the Insect from head to tail, and gives this grass- 

 hopper an exact likeness to a membracid. Another 

 species from Ceylon^ has the pronotum developed 

 into a hood which covers the head, shoulders, 

 and middle of the back, and extends as a high 

 toothed peak over and in front of the head. 



^lany of the grasshoppers of other countries 

 are wingless and run into remarkable forms, some 

 of them being very spiny. One such, the toad 

 grasshopper,^ lives among stones in South Africa, 

 and is so " got up " in colour and surface orna- 

 mentation that it may be passed as a stone more 

 easily than recognized as a grasshopper. Another 

 species, from the karoo, ^ resembles a clod of earth, 

 and is so sedentary in its habits that it has lost 

 the ])ower of leaping by disuse of the leaping legs, 

 which it carries pressed along its back, and employs them only in the ])roduction 

 of sounds. In this species both sexes produce considerable noise, which appears 

 to serve them as a protection by scaring possible enenfies. The apparatus for 

 sound production in this species is not confined to the hind-thigh and the unde- 

 veloped wing-cover, but there are also swollen portions of the lower part of the side 



1 Cephalococma lineata. 2 Jetrix iMpunctatus. » Xerophyllum. ■ •* Cladonotus. 



* Trachypctra buio. « Methone anderssoni. 



Photo by\ 



[£. Step, F.L.S. 



Lubber Locust. 



-Some of the large grasshoppers of the southern 

 parts of North America are known as hibber or 

 clumsy locusts from an absence of grace in their 

 movements. They are heavily built, and whilst 

 their antenna" are rather long for short-horns, their 

 wings and wing-covers are not long enough to cover 

 the hind-body. Natural size. 



