EATING MACHINE: The migratory grass-hopper, Melanoplus sanguinipes, is the closest living relative of America's extinct plague locust. Can it also swarm?
One summer in the Oklahoma panhandle thegrasshoppers were everywhere. Every patch of weeds along the alleywould erupt like a pan of popping corn if I set foot in it. When wedrove the highway, we inadvertently slaughtered dozens. The collisionsspeckled our windshield with hemolymph. Their wings, coffee-coloredfans striped with yellow at the outer edges, lodged in our wipers andfluttered in the onrushing air. Sometimes an entire grasshopper, ormost of one, would lodge there as well, struggling to get free as thewind tore it to tatters.
They could be found in unaccustomedplaces that summer. For several mornings running I saw two or threeswimming in the dog's water dish. The rosebushes took on the riddledlook of lace, as though the grasshoppers had tasted the leaves andfound them unappealing but serviceable. In the country, the cedar postsof barbed wire fences would seem at a glance to be shimmering withheat, like a water mirage on the highway, but a second glance wouldshow the effect was not an optical illusion. The posts were simplycrawling with grasshoppers moving up or down for no apparent reason.They seemed to be moving with great caution, edging past each other.When a stationary grasshopper got bumped, it would draw its legs intighter and shift its footing, like a person uncomfortable on a crowdedbus.
Then there was the jackrabbit. We found it beside a dirt roadon the way to the mailbox. It was dead, probably road-killed.Grasshoppers were thick in the weeds and grass along that road, anddozens clustered on the carcass. When someone poked at itexperimentally, a few of the hoppers jumped off and opened their wingsand were carried away by the wind. Others crawled off sluggishly. Somestayed put. With the carcass now more exposed, we could see that it wasbald in patches, and that its hide was wounded in shallow divots, as ifit had been hit all over with buckshot that failed to penetrate. Itseemed that the grasshoppers had been eating it.
