Grasshoppers are intriguing, from living catapults that pleasantly pique a child’s curiosity to swarms of locusts that lay waste to agriculture, one of the pillars of human evolution, survivors par excellence that predate dinosaurs… there was this pumpkin vine at home this time around that had grew remarkably well, partly through the monsoons, and partly through a jet spray emanating once every morning from a hole in the water supply pipe which seems like a rather ingenious form of drip irrigation… co-existing with a Colocasia, the patch was a quintessential insect heaven… silver orb spiders were having a field day, trapping hapless butterflies and bees as crickets stridulated furiously looking for partners…
I was looking for the crickets when some short-horned grasshoppers caught my eye… bright fluorescent tinges of green peppered across the amphitheatre of large, lobed leaves… looking at the individual bug, one marvels how they terrorize farmers in large congregations, plundering fields with a robotic nonchalance… an instance where a herbivore seems more dangerous than a carnivore… or the fact that they are touted as the next big solution to solve world hunger… quite amusing in a way, devour what threatens to devour your crops… the lazy one that didn’t listen to the ant as per Aesop, or the modern version where it connives against the Formicidae… a sign of the times we live in…
These were nymphs, I assumed, looking at the half-grown wings and tentative jumps… young Acrididae completely engrossed in smoothing out the serrations at the borders of the leaves before its time to sing the serenade… they have different cultural symbolisms, the grasshoppers, deriving from their interaction with humans… largely negative in traditional farming communities and somewhat positive in hunting tribes… stalking the nymphs from various angles for a while, I let them be and resumed the search for crickets…
Musing on grasshoppers, Ranikhet, Uttarakhand
