Grasshoppers and crickets sing with straight wings
Orthoptera, from the Greek for straight wings, is the insect order of grasshoppers, locusts, crickets, katydids and wētā, with more than 20,000 species worldwide. They grow by incomplete metamorphosis, fold their wings fan-like at rest, and court with songs made by rubbing wings or legs fitted with rows of ridged bumps.
Two suborders split about 256 million years ago, some 44 million years after the order arose: Caelifera, the grasshoppers and locusts, and Ensifera, the crickets and their relatives. Their ears differ in position. Crickets, mole crickets and katydids hear through a tympanum on the front shin, while grasshoppers and locusts carry theirs on the first segment of the abdomen. Vibrations help individuals find one another, and most species have a distinctive song.
The body is roughly cylindrical, with long, muscular jumping hind legs, chewing mouthparts, big compound eyes and threadlike antennae. Narrow forewings called tegmina are hardened near the base and shield membranous hindwings, which fold like a fan beneath them. Nymphs, often called hoppers, look like wingless adults, sometimes in very different colours, and gain wings over successive moults; growth can take weeks or months depending on food and weather.
Locusts are the costly ones. Each can eat its own weight daily, and swarms can hold 80 million insects across some 460 square miles, historically clearing fields in a day. Grasshoppers normally stick to weeds and grasses but turn to crops such as soybeans during drought and crowding.
People also eat them. Orthopterans make up 13 percent of edible insects, including some 80 regularly eaten grasshopper species; in Madagascar and Oaxaca collectors gather them at dawn while cold keeps them sluggish, and by 2012 Thailand had about 20,000 cricket farmers across 53 provinces. Diodorus Siculus called certain Ethiopians locust eaters, Leviticus makes certain hopping locusts the only kosher insects, and researchers are studying how grasshopper guts break down cellulose and lignin for biofuel ideas.
Source: Orthoptera
