A Fishing Tale

text and photos : Norma A. Hubbard  (October 2024)

Growing up in the country provided lots of opportunity for adventures, especially with a river to explore. One activity my siblings and I learned on our own was fishing. We did not have proper fishing rods or gear, but we found hooks, so we figured out how to use string, sticks, and nuts as weights to fish. Bait was an experiment unto itself. We tried bread which no matter how tightly we packed it around a hook that bread would be floating away in no time feeding the fish. It was most likely my brother, Lance, who decided that grasshoppers would work, after all there were lots of them just hopping around and easy to catch. Kids can be cruel and looking back, this was rather cruel as we stuck those poor grasshoppers onto the hooks and tossed them alive to the fish.

The red-legged grasshopper (Melanoplus femurrubrum) is very common in our area, in fact it is one of the most adaptable and wide-spread grasshoppers in North America. Although grasshoppers come in various shades of yellow, brown, red, and green, it is the distinctive red stripe on the hind leg that gives the redlegged grasshopper its name. Grasshoppers make noises or ‘sing’ known as stridulate by rubbing their hind legs against their wings. This singing is used to call to potential mates. Unlike crickets who are mostly out a night, grasshoppers sing during the day.

A female grasshopper produces pods with about 20 to 26 eggs in each pod. Pods provide protection for the eggs during the winter. The eggs will hatch in the spring when the temperature rises. Red-legged grasshoppers can lay over 300 eggs during a summer. That’s a lot of grasshoppers. A grasshopper’s life cycle has three stages – egg, nymph, and adult – all happening within a few short months. The nymphs shed their skin (cuticle) five times as they grow larger. It takes about a month and a half for a nymph to molt into an adult with wings. A grasshopper can fly 30 to 40 feet. After only two weeks at the adult stage, the female grasshopper starts laying eggs. Adults live about two to three months. Basically, cold weather kills them.

A group of grasshoppers is known as a cloud; however, they are also called a plague, or a swarm, and for good reason. Although alive for only a short time, grasshoppers are pests. They are herbivores. During an outbreak, a cloud of grasshoppers can destroy a field of crops, such as corn, cabbage, beans, soybean, alfalfa, or other small grains. After destroying crops, it is easy to understand why farmers call them a plaque! Grasshoppers don’t have many predators, but wild birds like turkeys and grouse, or domesticated fowl like guinea hens are good at keeping their populations down. I guess it was okay we used a few as bait considering they are such pests to crops.

No doubt most people know Aesop’s fable, The Ant and the Grasshopper. The original Greek story had a cicada and not a grasshopper singing and dancing away his days. Regardless of the bug species used, it is a moral tale about the virtues of hard work and saving for the future. However, it seems that the French author, Jean de La Fontaine, thought it was not the best message to give children and felt that the ant was too self-serving and too harsh on the poor grasshopper. He felt we should teach charity and kindness, so his version makes the ant rather mean and the grasshopper more of a sad character who perhaps should not be treated so badly by the ant. Readers still get the message that hard work is important, but we are also meant to feel sorry for the poor grasshopper and to be kind.

As harvest time along with Thanksgiving has arrived, and we are busy like ants preparing for winter, let us be sure to embrace the more modern retelling of the fable and be kind rather than righteous to those who may need our help.

Online Sources: A Guide to Grasshopper Control in Yards and Gardens, University of Nebraska; Red-legged Grasshopper, Entomology, U. of Wyoming; The Ant and the Grasshopper, Wikipedia