218 INSECTS 
Grasshoppers. — There are numerous species of grass- 
hoppers and many of them are very destructive to vegetation. 
Early settlers of Minnesota, the Dakotas, and Nebraska 
still tell us how the Rocky Mountain grasshoppers or locusts 
devastated this entire region repeatedly between the years 
1875 and 1880, devouring every green thing to be found. 
They came in the first place in great swarms from the eastern 
foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Smaller numbers have 
arrived once or twice in more recent years. The annual 
damage to our meadows and pastures from our common 
GRASSHOPPERS 
a, a locust or short-horned grasshopper; b, common meadow grasshopper 
or true grasshopper. 
species, like the red-legged grasshopper, must be very large, 
though it is hard to estimate, as they generally eat only a 
portion of the plants which they attack. 
There are two families of grasshoppers, the short-horned 
and the long-horned. The former, properly called locusts, 
have feelers that are much shorter than the body; in the 
second family the feelers are longer than the body and very 
slender. They are called meadow grasshoppers. The katy- 
dids belong to the same family and have similar antenna, 
but they are larger insects. The crickets are closely re- 
lated to the grasshoppers and have the same sort of power- 
ful hind legs for jumping. They: have long feelers like the 
meadow grasshoppers and katydids. 
