Insect Picture of the Day

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Today is July 24th, which is a state holiday in Utah. It’s Pioneer Day here, comemmorating the arrival of the first mormon immigrants to the Salt Lake Valley in 1847.

When they arrived, the Salt Lake Valley was nothing but a huge stretch of hard clay desert, with a giant lake of salt at the bottom of it. The mormons said “this is the right place” anyway, and started farming. Oh, the wacky fun they had trying to farm the desert! But they did it–and just as the crops were coming in, the skies were darkened by clouds of crickets descending on their new crops.

Well, they weren’t really crickets. They’re actually a type of shieldback katydid, but they are a unique species and so bear their common name “mormon cricket”.

Mormon crickets eat everything in sight, including each other when they run out of other food. (In fact, one recent study’s findings were that mormon crickets migrate because they want to eat the cricket in front of them—and not be eaten by the cricket behind.) The pioneers were saved when flocks of seagulls suddenly arrived and ate the crickets.

Mormon crickets get over 7cm long. A friend once drove a highway and observed about one cricket in every square foot of the highway, and then shuddered to discovere that it was not actually a “swarm” year. In swarm years, you can’t see the asphalt at all. They are still a problem in farming areas of Utah. Nowadays we rely on insecticides. The seagulls are still here, but apparently they’d rather hang out at the landfill.

I have to confess that I mined this image off the Internet. I didn’t realize until two days ago that I needed to get a picture of a mormon cricket for today, and they’re not exactly plentiful anymore, at least not in the urban areas of Utah. So I pulled this image from wikipedia. The image is copyrighted under the GNU Free Documentation License, which means I am obligated to tell you that:

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this image under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.

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This great photo of a katydid comes from Jim Phillips. Well, actually, his sister-in-law Diane, who took these photo near Barnegat Bay in September. This one is probably a male as it has no ovipositor.

Lately I have been noticing crypsis–the various means an animal will employ to avoid observation. Crypsis covers all aspects, including nocturnal behavior (i.e. staying at home when diurnal predators are out), subterranean lifestyle (living where predators don’t normally go), and transparency (you can’t see what you can’t… um… see), but by far the most obvious hiding mechanism is camouflage. I find the leaf mimicry on this katydid to be astonishing; if this bug were in my pear tree I probably wouldn’t see it if I were looking right at it!

Thanks, Diane!

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We have reader Andrew Lin to thank for today’s awesome insect photo. He sent in this picture, and says it is a sierra shieldback katydid. I love the mottled camouflage on this bug. She almost looks more like a machine than an insect.

Andrew took this photo in October of 2006 along a hiking trail in Calaveras Big Tree State Park in Northern California. I don’t have a good size reference from this photo, but judging from the grain of the wood, and it probably being redwood or cedar (popular outdoor railing woods), and it being a katydid, I’d say she’s probably 2-3cm long. That’s not counting the long thin ovipositor coming out her backside–which is how you can tell gender on katydids.

Oh, this is interesting: BugGuide says that shieldbacks are “predaceous katydids”; they further say “Some species are active predators of other insects. Many also eat plant material and scavenge dead insects.” So, cool–it’s a predator!

Awesome photo, Andrew!

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Before settling on www.insectpod.com for a domain name, I considered www.this-thing-stung-my-cousin-in-the-neck-and-now-hes-in-a-coma.com. This katydid would have been the poster insect.

Most of you will be glad to know that’s actually an ovipositor and not a stinger, but a small few of you will be thinking www.this-thing-stung-my-cousin-in-the-neck-AND-LAID-EGGS-IN-THERE- and-now-hes-in-a-coma.com.

Well, don’t be silly. Domain names can’t be that long.