Over, once again to the divine Ms F. After a gap of a few weeks during which she has been about her studies, she is back and as charming as usual....
When I was about 12 my father was visiting our house and we were outside enjoying the sunshine, when I found a grasshopper on my foot. Normally this would have led to the immediate eviction of said beast, but this grasshopper was a bright deep pink. I remember clearly picking it up and showing it to my father; he said that if we were Victorians we would have stuck a pin through the poor pretty creature but that we should let it go. So I placed it among the raspberries and off it merrily hopped.
That was not the last I thought of the grasshopper though: I have always been curious about why it was pink; was it the raspberries it was on? Was it just a bizarre mutation? It can’t really have been for camouflage unless it had evolved very quickly to live on certain of my mother’s flowers.
A probable cause is that the pink grasshoppers, (and pink Katydids in Pennsylvania) have a condition called Erythrism, which according to the ever-accurate (of course) Wikipedia, means ‘an unusual reddish pigmentation of an animal's body, hair, skin, feathers, or eggshells’.
Years later I told the lovely Max Blake about the grasshopper and its vivid pinkness, and he showed me photographs online of others, notably several from Hastings. If the pinkness is indeed caused by a mutation I suppose it would make sense for there to be areas of high concentration of them. I’ve never observed another one in my mother’s garden but I shall be having a close look this summer.
Personally, I think grasshoppers should also come in nice blue and mauve colours; a prize for anyone who finds me one!
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