Perfidious Nature
Comments: 4
I just went and sat out in the garden for a minute to take a little break from work and cool down a bit and I noticed something very disturbing. A neighbour gave us some herbs — mostly different kinds of mint — and these have become home to a surprising number of the most astonishingly green grasshoppers you’ve ever seen. For the last week or so I’ve looked on admiringly, thinking these beautifully streamlined creatures (the Captain Nemo’s submarine of insects) were hunting for the caterpillars that were eating the leaves of the mint. “Go get ‘em, tigers!” I would say, careful not to flood them off the leaves when I watered.
Sitting there just now, however, I noticed a particularly fat and contented looking grasshopper happily munching his way through a leaf. Bastards! They’re not hunters at all (I must have been confusing them with praying mantises, whose colour they share but manage to exceed). And here I was thinking that us carnivores had to stick together (at least until the going gets rough, then we kill and eat each other. C’est la vie).
I’m feeling throroughly betrayed (yes, yes, by my own ignorance and insectivorous bloodlust — I’m simply taking it out on the grasshoppers) but now my juleps will be mintless, and that’s no julep at all.
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Posted to General Rants • 2003.08.07 (Thu) • 15:57
Comments
Posted by qB 2003.08.07, 18:05
Perhaps you should eat the grasshoppers. Ready herbed, just flash fry them. I understand the family as a whole is very nutritious.
Posted by Pete 2003.08.07, 19:50
We had an absolutely huge dragonfly burst into the living room earlier this week. Came buzzing in through the open French windows, and was only slightly smaller than a B52.
My wife, however, didn’t seem phased at all - normally she’ll leap a clear foot off the ground if an insect gets within 1/2 a mile or so. But on this occaision, she didn’t mind it at all…
…at least, not until I told her that dragonfly’s have very large, very powerful jaws, and are able to give you a very nasty bite indeed. I think she made the dragonfly jump as well then.
Could you post a pic of your grasshoppers jh? I ran to get my camera when the dragonfly invaded, but it had left by the time I came back downstairs with a suitable lens.
Posted by Kevin 2003.08.11, 11:49
I think it must be mating season for the dragonflies.
I live near Nijo-jo in Kyoto city and on my daily walk past the castle it seems like there are a heck of a lot of them buzzing about. I had never seen so many of them at one time before and so it had never occurred to me that they were scary. They do seem to crash into you pretty randomly, as if drunk behind the wheel. I am pretty careful walking along that stretch of sidewalk now though. I don’t need any big insect bites to go along with my new sunburn…
Posted by Charles Daniel (author of of The Stasis Option) 2006.04.09, 05:47
“Astonishingly green grasshoppers” sounds like katydids. If you have never seen a katydid, you would be correct in describing it as looking like a grasshopper.
Katydids have slender rear legs and move slowly and gracefully except when flying or hopping. If you also hear high-pitched keenings or screeches at night, then your grasshoppers are probably katydids.
The green of katydids is exactly the green of mantises. The reason for the name “katydid”: some people say their “call” sounds like the english phrase “Katy did it.”
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