“Fraidy-bug” Grasshoppers make bad fertilizer.
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
What are grasshoppers so afraid of anyway?
It turns out that grasshoppers are afraid of spiders. Really, really, afraid. So afraid that grasshoppers binge eat on carbon rich carbohydrates. Well what do YOU eat when watching a horror movie? This study, and don’t ask if our tax dollars funded it, raised grasshoppers in company with spiders that eat grasshoppers. The spider’s mandibles were glued shut so they could scare but not eat the grasshoppers. In comparison, spiders raised in a predator free environment had far less carbon in their makeup. Instead there was a natural mix of carbon and nitrogen.
So, too bad for the grasshoppers you might say.
Like getting raised by the wrong parents, one set of grasshoppers got scientists who had magnifying glasses, crazy glue, oh, and spiders. But there’s more. Looking at a bigger picture it turns out that there is an impact on, you guessed it, the environment!
When fearfully raised grasshoppers go their final rest, their carbon rich carcasses prove to be hard to digest for soil microbes. These microbes need nitrogen to decompose plant remains. The decomposed plant remains turns into the fertilizer necessary for the next season’s plant growth.
When the microbes have a hard time, then the fertilizer isn’t produced which in turn has a suppressive effect on new growth. With less growth, then herbivores have less to eat and may produce fewer young. With fewer herbivores, predators go hungry. And so on. This is also true for extreme biomes, and water itself is recycled and undergoes re-use.
All this is going on out there in the yard.
Its a jungle out there, and not just because I haven’t done the final lawn mowing yet. This is a little example of the interdependence of plant, animal, insect, microbe, and soil. Scale this up with many more players and many niches then interlock each biome with the entire ecosystem, and you can begin to understand why ecologists and other scientists take the time to study seemingly minute interactions like the one of the “fraidy-bug” grasshoppers!