Grasshoppers

There are tons of cool grasshoppers here. To those who are disturbed by close proximity to more-than-two legged creatures, I hope this will allow you appreciate them from a close but safe distance.

I saw a bunch like this one in the botanical gardens on campus.

From a highly scientific study about how much you can poke a grasshopper before it starts hopping away, Becky and I concluded that if we were birds, we would definitely be eating grasshoppers for every meal.

This is a bottom view of a grasshopper I already posted a picture of in the nature reserve near where I live. They're my favourite grasshoppers because of the awesome colours. (I’ve put my default language in Microsoft Word to English (South Africa) so that I don’t have spelling errors in my assignments, but now I feel silly with all the extra u’s.)

 

  

On the rafting trip I went on last weekend, I went walking through the savanna with my friends Becky and Caroline. In some places, the grass was taller than us.

 

The savanna biome has both grass and trees. I learned in my ecology practical that this grass smells like turpentine, but I can’t remember what it’s called. Some of the grasses have very successful animal-dispersed seeds—we emerged with tons of seeds of various sorts stuck to all our clothes.

In the savannah, we came upon a grasshopper mating ground. There were tons of pairs of grasshoppers in this position.

 

The most common trees in the savannah are these acacia trees, which are quite short and very thorny. There were, of course, mating grasshoppers all over this tree.

We even saw a few pairs in the middle of having sex.

I’ll end with a grasshopper I saw in our dorm kitchen a couple days ago when we were making chicken stir fry with spicy mango sauce. Someone who lives on my floor told us that these grasshoppers are lucky, so I didn’t let the other girls chase it away.