John White, age 14, of Lancaster, Pa., for his question:
What makes a grasshopper spit tobacco juice?
The grasshopper and his kinfolk are the music makers of the world of insects. Summner is their song season when their merry glee clubs strike up in every grassy patch across the land. Grasshoppers and crickets chirp their cheerful notes, and the katydid adds a tuneful phrase. Sometimes locusts join the choir with the whirring of their gauzy wings.
It is worth a little trouble to catch a grasshopper and study him under a magnifying glass or a more powerful hand lens. Chances are when captured he will spit a gob or two of brownish liquid in your direction. This is one of the tricks he uses to defend himself .
This so called tobacco juice is harmless to human beings. But when properly aimed, the gooey pellet may discourage a prowling field mouse or a hungry bird. At least it may force these and other natural enemies of a grasshopper to pause long enough for him to males his escape. His best defense, of course, is escape by means of giant leaps. If a six foot man could ,jump like a grasshopper, he could spring up 60 feet and cover 120 feet of distance in a single leap.
With same know how and a little patience it is possible to catch a grasshopper day or night. He spends the day hungrily devouring grass and other greenery. He is hard to spot because his coloring blends in with his background, but your noisy footsteps tend to send him leaping from tuft to grassy tuft. You can spot where he lands and pop a net over the area. At night he can be located by his chirrup, and the beam of a flashlight may send him shooting up from his old hiding place to a new one.
A captive grasshopper tries hard to escape, so place him in a glass jar and add some greenery to make him feel comfortable. Use a lens to magnify his comical head and the pieces that make up his amazing mouth. He has a pair of firm, flat lips and between them a first and second pair of jaws. The upper lip is the labrum, and the 1ower lip, fitted with a pair of jointed feelers, is the labium. The main jaws, called the mandibles, are a pair of toothy plates. The secondary jaws are maxilla, fitted with sensitive feelers. These mouth parts form the chewing organ with which the grasshopper chews quantities of greenery.
The we11 chewed food, mixed with saliva, is swallowed and sent through several stomachs, one of which is a crop where the juicy mixture may be stored. As a rule the grasshopper has a gob of wet and well chewed food ready to aim at his enemies.
Grasshoppers are classed in the orthoptera order of insects along with the crickets and katydids, the mantis and locusts, the roaches and the spindly walking sticks. The long horned grasshoppers, with lengthy antennae, belong in a family with the katydids. The short horned grasshoppers, with stumpy antennae, belong in a family with the locusts.