A worldwide community photographing and learning about wildlife
Project Noah Nature School
Mermiria bivittata maculipennis
The grasshopper is about 2.5 inches long. It has wings and distinctive brown striping along the length of the body. The attenna are short. The face is slanted and this an identifying feature.
This is a backyard habitat. As shown in the second picture, it has a lot a lot of trees, shrubs and flowers to attract birds and insects.
The heavy rains of the week of July 14, 2013 seems to brought many new insects into the yard. The best reference is the bugguide. It has an excellent likeness to my spotting.
Special thanks to ForestDragon.
This was a difficult ID and even got the sub species name.
This is a wonderful spotting of a beautiful insect called a Toothpick Grasshopper! They are members of the Gomphocerinae or Slant-faced Grasshoppers (if you look at the face you can see why they are called that!).
Amblycorypha huasteca or the Texas Oblong-winged Katydid looks a bit different. You can compare yours to the ones on this page:
http://bugguide.net/node/view/462708
One sure way to tell Grasshoppers apart from Katydids (and Crickets) is that Grasshoppers have shorter, thicker antennae, while Katydids an Crickets have long, thin, thread-like antennae. There are some other differences but that is one that is easier to observe most of the time.
You are lucky that you have these cool guys where you live. They don't occur up here in NY.
Hope this helps!
Spotted on Jul 20, 2013
Submitted on Jul 20, 2013
+2
