Want to know more about grasshoppers?

• BugGuide (the ultimate insect reference site): bugguide.net/node/ view/15740

• Field Guide to Common Western Grasshoppers: www.sdvc.uwyo.edu/ grasshopper/fieldgde. htm#fieldguidetoc

• Singing Insects of North America: buzz.ifas.ufl.edu. A fascinating site that helps identify crickets, katydids and cicadas from America north of Mexico.

A guide to grasshoppers

Grasshoppers belong to a category of insects known as Orthoptera ("straight wing"), referring to the straight and thickened forewings that cover their more delicate hind wings. In the U.S. there are around 660 types of grasshoppers. Related to them are another 500 of their relatives, the crickets and katydids.

Southern Arizona, with its varied habitats, mild climate and close ties to the tropics, is an excellent place to find these insects. Here, grasshoppers occur pretty much everywhere, and, by visiting our grasslands, pine-clad mountaintops, deserts of cactus and ocotillo, sagebrush and creosote flats, lake edges and oak woodlands, we might find about one-quarter of the species that live in the U.S.

To the entomologist, many of Southern Arizona's grasshoppers are especially interesting because they barely enter the U.S. from Mexico.

Admittedly, not everyone finds grasshoppers and their kin to be as charismatic as Jiminy Cricket — adorned in top hat and umbrella as he sings "When you wish upon a star." After all, since biblical time, grasshoppers, often referred to as locusts, have been responsible for more crop damage throughout the world than any other group of insects.

Unimaginable numbers compete with cattle on native range lands, while others can devastate crops of cotton, grains, citrus and vegetables.

Add these losses to the cost of pesticides applied by farmers, and their annual impact reaches the hundreds of millions of dollars.

During the late 1800s and early 1900s, certain grasshoppers were responsible for the abandonment of entire communities in the American West, as they consumed not only crops, but every leaf and blade of grass. The economic havoc they wrought triggered the first welfare relief programs for farmers.

Of all the Western grasshoppers, perhaps two dozen species have earned a reputation as economic pests. Most have a benign presence and a few are even beneficial to ranchers — eating noxious weeds.

Because of their abundance, they are a major source of food for wildlife such as reptiles, amphibians and small mammals. Birds especially feed heavily on them, including turkeys, hawks, roadrunners, meadowlarks and a variety of sparrows.

All grasshoppers enrich the soil with their droppings and, in the end, as their bodies are broken down by bacteria, they return nutrients to the land.

— Robert A. Behrstock