Green-striped Grasshopper (Chortophaga viridifasciata) - Noticing Familiar Things

Green-striped grasshopper
(Chortophaga viridifasciata)
Photo by Brad Sylvester
copyright 2011, all rights
reserved

There’s a line from a Billy Joel song that goes: “Don’t imagine you’re too familiar and I don’t see you anymore.”  Many times, however, we do fail to see things that have become too familiar. Before I started my quest to identify every species of animal that lives in my yard, I might see a grasshopper and note that it’s a grasshopper, or think that every bumblebee I see is one of the same group. Probably even the same hive.  As I start taking close-up pictures and then using specific traits to identify the species of things I see in my yard, however, I am seeing things I never saw before and realizing just how diverse the animal populations in one small 5.25 acre really are.

I’ve already made entries here for the two-striped grasshopper and the two-spotted bumblebee, so I’ve become a little familiar with their detailed appearance. So when I see a bumblebee I don’t just see another bumblebee. I notice instead that this one has bit of orange on its abdomen and therefore isn’t the same species as the two-spotted bumblebee that I’ve already logged. I didn’t have camera to get good photos of it, but I know now that I have at least two species of bumblebees and the next time I’m out with my camera, I’ll being looking for the specific colors and markings of every bumblebee I see.

Similarly, I was out walking across the lawn when a grasshopper jumped up in front of me. It was green like the two-striped grasshopper I had already recorded, but it had wings which made it a different age than the fourth instar specimen that I had photographed the other day. Wanting a closer look, I carefully grabbed it off the lawn and set it on the patio table. Eye bars! Not only was it a different age, it was a different species. There were not two stripes on its back, there was not a uniform black stripe on its leg. It was definitely not a two-striped grasshopper.

Using the USDA site again, I started picking out grasshoppers from their list for further research. On my seventh try, not bad considering how many there are (and how little I know about them), I found it. It was, without doubt an adult female green-striped grasshopper (Chortophaga viridifasciata). It lives here, the size fits, the distinctive shape and pattern of the pronotum (the plate that covers the top of the thorax extending from the back of the head) matched exactly!

Interestingly, the green-striped grasshopper females are green and the males tend to be brown. Males and females both fly to escape threats, but says the USDA the females can fly 20-60 feet, twice as far as the males.

They prefer wet, grassy areas –including irrigated fields. The USDA says they have been found in red clover and tobacco fields, but it’s not clear if they are damaging the crops or just eating the weed grasses. Either, this grasshopper, which is quite common in the eastern United States, is probably not going to hurt my gardens at all. It definitely prefers Kentucky Bluegrass over Kentucky Wonder Pole Beans.

Quick facts about the green-striped grasshopper (Chortophaga viridifasciata)

Life Cycle: eggs hatch around July, then begin molting through their instar segments beginning in early April and taking about 100 days to reach the fourth instar. They’ll overwinter in the fourth or fifth instar stage. In the spring, perhaps in early April, depending upon the temperature, they re-emerge and begin developing into adults with one or two more molts depending upon what stage they were in when they went dormant for winter. The adults lay eggs in sandy soil which hatch into nymphs and the cycle repeats.

Diet: Grass

Range: From Montana to New Mexico and east to the Atlantic Coast. Southern Canada. Mexico and Central America.

IUCN Redlist Status: Prevalent, not-listed

When are they here: Green-striped grasshoppers stay all year round although the dormant nymphs may be difficult to locate during the winter months. Once they reach adulthood, they may travel some distance before mating and laying eggs.

Two-spotted Bumblebee (Bombus bimaculatus)

Two-spotted Bumblebee (Bombus bimaculatus)
Photo by Brad Sylvester, copyright 2011, all rights reserved
For more photos, click here

Growing up in New England with clover in the lawn, I have certainly seen my share of bees. Although I recall that there used to be far more wild honeybees than I see these days, I do still see a good number of bumblebees in my yard. I see them on the flowers of my squash, peppers, chives and many different flowers all over the yard.  (Let me first say some people use bumble bee as two words and some say bumblebee as one word, I’m going to use the latter variant throughout this page.)

I’ve never really looked closely enough to see what species they were specifically, until now. It turns out that there are quite a few different kinds of bumblebees. My Audubon field guide only lists a few, but it can hardly be blamed as it only covers about 550 insects of the 100,000 or so that live in North America. Whatever species they are, they are certainly welcome in the garden because they seem to be doing a pretty good job of picking up where the missing honeybees have left off in terms of pollinating my vegetable gardens and apple trees.

To figure out what species a bumblebee is, you have to look at the pattern of black and yellow on its head, thorax and abdomen. The best reference for common bumblebee patterns that I’ve found online is this chart from Bumblebee.org. Comparing the photos of bumblebees that I took at about 9:30 a.m. on the sunny morning of July 7^th, 2011, with the grass still wet from evening rains, they appear to be of the species Bombus bimaculatus or the two-spotted bumblebee which therefore becomes the third wild species and second insect added to the master list of What Lives in my Yard? There may be other species as well living in my yard, I’ll be more observant from now on and if I spot a different kind, I’ll make a note of it for this blog.

I’ve included a single picture here on this page, but if you’d like to see a slideshow of the other pictures I took of the two-spotted bumblebee, click here. I’m going to try to put up slideshows of most species from now on to give a wider range of views, and talk about identification a little using the photos. Field guides generally have a single photo and it may be hard to identify one you see given individual differences from the single example.  That’s why I try to take photos from a variety of angles if there is any doubt about the species.

Bumblebees, in general, are pretty easy-going and won’t aggressively attack like a yellow-jacket might. If they do, however, bumblebees have the advantage of being able to sting over and over again since they do not leave their stingers in their victims.

The two-spotted bumblebee, according to bugguide.net, has a long tongue, not unlike a hummingbird’s tongue, that is used to sip nectar from inside long tube flowers. The ones I photographed, however, were collecting pollen. In the photos you can see the pollen sacs on their legs are full and yellow with pollen that will be carried back to the hive. Bombus bimaculatus feeds on both nectar and pollen.

Bumblebees live in ground burrows, and experience a near complete hive die-off each winter. Only the queen survives to re-establish the hive in the spring. Interestingly, the queen bumble bee herself will actually go out and collect pollen for the first new worker bee larva in the spring.

The two-spotted bumblebee lives east of the Mississippi River from southern Canada to Florida.