|
These
absolutely incredible looking insects are
HORSEHEAD GRASSHOPPERS
from Peru! I believe them to be the
strangest-looking insects I have ever kept and they
are one of my favourites too! They resemble
stick insects in many ways (and like stick insects
they feed on leaves such as bramble and oak) but as
they are grasshoppers they have enormously long back
legs and can hop surprisingly well considering how
thin these legs are! This is the female, who
is much larger than the male:


These
animals get their common name due to their very
unusually shaped heads as you can see above and
below, and I think they have a confused kind of
facial expression which I think is absolutely
brilliant!

Here are
the male and female together, the male being much
more slender and a lovely bright green colour all
over:

In the
picture below the male has his front feet in the
female's face, how cheeky!!

You can
see really clearly in the next picture just how much
smaller and more slender the male is, and also the
colour difference between the two:

The male
appears to have an even more 'confused' expression
than the female, with his enormous bulbous eyes
making him look more like a cartoon character than a
real living insect!!




Baby
horsehead grasshoppers are extremely cute, as I
discovered in early July 2010 when my first ever
babies of this species hatched! The babies
pictured below are offspring of the adult pair in
the pictures above:



You can
see how tiny they are from this picture of one of
them on my fingertip above! I am very much
looking forward to seeing how these grow and change
in the months to come, watch this space!

|