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They say animals have their own defense mechanism to protect themselves from predators or intruders. One of those defense mechanisms is camouflaging, to adapt to the environment like a chameleon which this lovely grasshopper seem to have tried but failed to escape my eyes. It was not able to hide from my phone camera.
I took the photos in the province where I was born. My elder brother and his family are living in that place so we other members of the family would visit there every now and then. When we visited them, we usually take time to go to our old farm and reminisce the good old days. Even if the farm has turned into a mini-forest because it is not being operated anymore, we still enjoy just killing the day there. We would bring raw foods and cook our lunch through fire woods.
It was one of our visits in the farm that gave me the opportunity to go back to the child in me. While the rest are busy preparing our food, I was busy getting lost somewhere else being one with #nature. I would hear my mother call me once in a while to help on the food preparation but I would just laugh and call out, “I’m busy.” When she was calling and I was taking shots of this grasshopper, I just kept quite. I did not want to make any sound that would scare the insect away.
Grasshoppers are one of the insects that I love playing with when I was young. I remember in grade school when we were discussing biology, grasshoppers were noted to be the perfect example of the insect animal class because it has the typical insect body part – head, thorax and abdomen.
They say grasshoppers have relationship with humans. Swamps of them can cause damage to crops though it is something we have not encountered in our old farm. My mother would not want us to treat them as pests. She would even ask us to let grasshoppers be if any of them found their way inside the house. She was saying she knew somewhere in our country where these types of insects can be used as food but she never had us try it. Now I see on Wikipedia that these are indeed used as food in Mexico and Indonesia.
I estimated this to be about 4 inches long from its head to tail end, not considering the antenna. Grasshoppers of this size can jump as high as one meter or even higher if it uses its wings. This is the most common challenge I had when I try to catch them. They keep on jumping or flying from one place to another but not really disappearing. My mother used to laugh at me when she sees me chasing one and the insect seems to keep on taunting me.
Those were the days. I do not catch them anymore as I used to. I just catch them now on camera.
I looked up this green grasshopper on the web and found that it belongs to the neoconocephalus genus. Following is the hierarchical scientific classification of this cute creature.
Screenshot from Wikipedia
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