Shelli Hansen, age 12, of Spokane, Washington, for her question:
Do grasshoppers shed their skins?
Yes, they do, and if you keep a pet grasshopper you may watch this amazing operation perhaps six times during his lifetime. One summer's day, Andy saw a ghostly pale grasshopper on a juniper bough. He did not leap away, as he usually would. In fact, he looked too done in to move at all. Near him on the bough was the papery skin he had just shed. After half an hour in the sun, he turned the proper grasshopper color, regained his pep and bounded on his way.
The grasshopper's skin is a crisp exoskeleton. It holds his soft internal organs in shape but it is too stiff to stretch as he grows. All insects have this problem and many solve it by growing through caterpillar and pupa stages. The grass¬hopper and about 20,000 other insects of his group do not remodel themselves through these stages of life. The infants that hatch from the eggs are wingless little copies of their adult parents, encased in stiff exoskeletons. As they grow, they molt their tight skins for larger ones.
Entomologists, who study insects, naturally have a name for this type of growth. They call it incomplete metamorphosis. The butterflies remodel themselves through four quite different stages. Their growth style is called complete metamorphosis. The grasshoppers hatch from eggs, as do all insects. But unlike the butterflies, they do not progress through caterpillar and pupa stages.
The female grasshopper has a long ovipositor at the end of her abdomen, which she uses to poke her eggs into the ground. The tiny eggs are pale, white ovals and there may be just two or as many as 120 of them in a batch: They are stuck together in a neat double row and the mother squirts in more sticky stuff to seal the batch in a waterproof pod. She buries many pods through the summer and fall.
Usually the eggs stay safely underground through the winter and hatch in the spring. The new born midgets have big heads, stubby bodies, large legs for leaping and no wings. Otherwise they are like their parents, especially when it comes to devouring the greenery. They grow fast and their stiff skins soon become too tight.
Meantime, however, soft wrinkled skins have grown under their old exoskeletons. When these new skins are ready, the old ones crack and the young grasshoppers struggle to get out of them. The new skins stretch to fit their bigger bodies and soon stiffen in the sunshine. The growing insects molt, or shed their old skins, five or six times as they grow to adult size. After the last molt, they emerge with wings.
The growing grasshoppers are called nymphs and most of them progress through large and larger nymph stages in six to eight weeks. After the final molt they are adults, eager to mate and lay eggs for the next generation. All grasshoppers are rated as destructive insects because they devour countless tons of our green crops and garden plants. Their first cousins, the locusts, are rated as downright plagues.