Imagine you are in a deep dark forest. Imagine incredibly tall, slender tree trunks that sprout out of the ground and reach up all the way into the sky. Moving around on the ground is not easy because of the criss-cross of tree trunks that overlap each other. The noise of the wind moving through the tops of the tall trees is very loud. On the floor of this forest it is quite dark but the sky can normally be seen because, unlike in the woods that you and I know, there are not so many leaves on the trees here.
Now imagine that you live in this forest and you want to talk to your family or to your friends. You know they are not so far away but you can’t see them all of the time because of all the trees in the way. How would you find them? How would you let them know you are there and you are OK? You would probably shout very loud to talk to them. Louder than the noise of the wind blowing through the leaves. Your shouting might sound like this:
(sorry for the funny robotic sounds - Audioboo thought it was being clever by trying to correct the hum of the crickets!)
Welcome to the world of grasshoppers and crickets! I recorded the sound of these grasshoppers talking to each other in a field close to my home. Here is a photo of that field. It is just a meadow of grass in July.
To you and me it is a meadow of grass about waist height but to a small insect it is that great forest I have described. I also took the picture of that pretty green grasshopper at the top of this blog post in the same field on the same day. It was about the size of the tip of my thumb. Shortly after I took a photo of another grasshopper that I found in the same patch of grass:
Whoa! Wait a minute! They look very different but they both look like grasshoppers, don’t they? What is going on here?
It turns out that in my country, Britain, there is not just one type of grasshopper. There are 28 types! There are 15 different types of grasshopper and 13 types of cricket. Some of them live here all the time and some are tourists who come around from time to time. Standing up and seeing them from a distance they have always looked the same to me. The first time I noticed a difference between them was when I took these two photos. The second darker one I noticed was quite a bit bigger than the first - about half the length of my thumb. The photos close up show all sorts of other differences. What differences can you see between them?
So you see a grasshopper is not just a grasshopper. Any grasshopper you see in the summertime belongs to its own special family and there are other types from different families that look similar from far away but different close up. Next time you see one take a closer look if you can and see if you can find out what it’s family name is. If you want some help with that I am using the Field Studies Council Guide to British grasshoppers and allied insects fold out booklet and you might find that helpful too.
If you would like to listen to this blog post instead then press play on the audioboo widget below:
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