Why I am scared of Grasshoppers

You be afraid of Spiders if you want but for me it has got to be Grasshoppers.

Because they are so difficult to identify. All of the animals in this post are the same species, a Woodland Grasshopper, Omocestus rufipes. This is one of the easier species to identify.

This is a Woodland Grasshopper…

and this is another Woodland Grasshopper.

Admittedly those pictures are first a male and then a female but Grasshoppers of the same  species don’t seem to feel any obligation to look the like each other. They very often look like something else.

This next female Woodland was wrongly identified for me by a good authority as a Common Green.

This picture does look very much like a Common Green but on it’s own it doesn’t show enough detail to make a positive identification, fortunately I had a set.

If you do feel like messing with some of these very dangerous animals (they can cause frustration) here are a few pointers as to what to look for.

What makes it a Woodland Grasshopper?

Colour isn’t a great help. Males are usually beige above as in my first picture and females are green or brown, that doesn’t leave much. If you find a blue one then it isn’t a Woodland.

Keels: These are the edges of the pronotum (The saddle like structure behind the head) and are sometimes called “pronotal side-keels”. They are a feature used to aid with grasshopper identification.

The Woodland Grasshopper has quite sharply angled keels. (so does the Common Green)

Then there are the palps. These are the mouth parts that hang down beside the jaws and are used to grasp food. They are white in this next picture (sorry about the quality)

You should try to get a picture of the palps if you want to get an identification. The woodland Grasshopper has white tipped palps but then the Common Green can have those as well.

This is the clincher for our Woodland versus Common Green identification. The  Common Green doesn’t have any red on the abdomen.

Why not just look at the abdomen first? Quite a few other species do have red abdomens.

Identification comes down to comparing several different characteristics and not the obvious ones either, if this had a hairy thorax it would be something different.

My advice is don’t play cards with Grasshoppers, they are very tricky and if you want to get a positive identification try and get more than one picture. You have to try and get as many angles as you can.