Nature Bulletin No. 23  July 14, 1945
Forest Preserve District of Cook County
Clayton F. Smith, President
Roberts Mann, Supt. of Conservation

****:GRASSHOPPERS

The grasshopper is the clown of the insect world. He does not "chew 
tobacco", as most boys think, but ejects a dark-brown digestive juice 
from his crop when captured and held. He is quite an athlete. If a man 
could leap as big and far, in proportion to his size, a man could jump 
over an eight-story building. Once in the air, the grasshopper can scar 
like an airplane with his stiff upper pair of wings, or fly considerable 
distances by rapidly vibrating his delicate lower pair.

He has five eyes. The two big ones are each compounded of thousands 
of little eyes for seeing distant objects from any angle. The three small 
eyes, one of them in the middle of his forehead, are for seeing tiny 
details at close range. His "ears" are on the sides of his stomach just 
behind the thorax or chest. He has two short "horns" or antennae.

His cousin, the katydid, with long horns and soft green body, has its 
ears on the front legs just below the first joint. Grasshoppers, katydids, 
crickets, cockroaches and termites are all cousins. The locust spoken of 
in the Bible as one of the seven plagues of Egypt was a grasshopper. 
Billions of billions of grasshoppers descending in clouds upon the grain 
fields of Nebraska and Kansas have periodically devastated huge areas.

But if the grasshopper is sometimes a pest, it is always an important 
item of food for wild creatures. Foxes, skunks, ground squirrels, moles, 
shrews and mice are all mammals which eat grasshoppers. Pheasants, 
quail, crows, herons and many song birds feed on them. Your 
Thanksgiving turkey probably ate many thousands fish, such as bass 
and bluegills, eat them. So do frogs, toads, lizards and snakes.

So do humans. Grasshoppers are ground up into "locust meal" by many 
of the desert tribes in Africa and Asia. The Japanese claim them to be 
more nourishing than fish and cook them in soy bean oil. Our American 
Indians dried them in the sun for winter use, mixed them with acorn 
meal and made patties which were roasted on hot stones.