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There are 22 species of grasshoppers in Estonia, known from songs and poems and blithely chirping without cares. It is said that grasshoppers don’t prepare for the winter, and so it is because with the frosts their life cycle ends. In spring a new generation of grasshoppers will develop from the eggs that the female grasshopper hides into the soil already this year. Development takes place from spring, with a hemimetabolous or incomplete metamorphosis – the hatched beings are similar to the imagos but are smaller, growing larger and moulting several times. The imagos are the ones chirping in dry and sunny hayfields.

 

The Ortopthera insects, with strong hind legs and coloured brownish, yellowish or greyish-green, can be up to an inch long. The antennae of grasshoppers are short, about half the body length. The sound is produced by the male grasshoppers by rubbing the serrated edge of the hind leg against the forewing – the sound lasts about one and a half seconds, strong, jarring and metallic. With such music-making female insects are lured into the male’s territory.

 

Grasshoppers are herbivores and grasses are their dining table. And so they can behave without a care, when a shortage of straws is nowhere to be seen in a meadow ...