A Grasshopper's Lot is Not a Happy One
by
Sam Loschiavo
It was on a glorious sunny warm day that I observed a pair of grasshoppers mating on a goldenrod. Buzzing insects of every size, shape and colour were indulging in aerial displays of acrobatic flying. The copulating grasshoppers were totally oblivious to the dazzling activity of the flies, lady beetles, aphids, wasps dragonflies around them. Even my inquisitive prying failed to separate this seemingly enraptured couple locked together in an apparently ecstatic embrace.
A more pragmatic explanation for this supposedly romantic interlude is species survival. Nature provides abundantly to ensure that most living things in the plant and animal kingdoms can reproduce and propagate their own kind. Flowers produce thousands of seeds, each equipped with wings, parachutes, hooks, or floatation devices to help their dissemination by wind, water, birds, and other animals. Consider for example, that one kernel of corn produces a plant six to eight feet high, bearing three to five cobs, each containing approximately 500 to 700 kernels. Each of those 2400 kernels (on average) per plant has the potential to produce another 2400 plants. When you begin extrapolating, the numbers become mind-boggling. In insects, too, nature is very prolific. Our supposedly blissful female grasshopper after mating can produce a large number of eggs all neatly packed in a pod. In late summer and fall, she inserts her ovipositor into the soil, drills a hole, and deposits the pod full of eggs. In the warm sun of the following spring, the eggs hatch into tiny nymphal grasshoppers. Fortunately for humans, especially farmers, only a small percentage hatch. The eggs face many hazards from flooding, desiccation, pesticides, parasites, predators and disease. Consequently, grasshoppers like so many other insects, must reproduce in large numbers to ensure their continued existence.
Amateur entomologists pose yet another threat. I recall a professor who had his own method of controlling grasshoppers. During one of his lectures, he described a walk through a meadow or a grain field with scissors in hand looking for the hoppers. He mimicked the scene by walking stealthily across the front of the lecture theatre. Upon encountering a grasshopper he would swoop down on the unsuspecting creature shouting "Aha, gotcha", and deftly snip off its ovipositor. He referred to this method as natural control. Students loved his performance.
Earlier I used the words' seemingly, 'apparently', and 'supposedly' to describe the emotional impact of the sex act between two grasshoppers. Many people subscribe to anthropomorphism, that is, to attribute human characteristics or human behaviour to animals. The reality is that lower animals, and certainly insects, mating is simply stereotyped behaviour to ensure survival of the species - not very romantic but nonetheless a grim fact of life. However, having said this I must admit that I ignored this biological reality by using the word "happy" in the title. Not being born as grasshoppers we humans could debate forever whether grasshoppers are happy during copulation. Perhaps the conversation between Don Marquis' character, archie, and the cat, Mehitabel, may shed some light on the debate:
i don't know to what man owes his superiority
everything he knows he has had had to learn
whereas we insects were born knowing everything we need to know.