I’d say it is the lubber, but a young one like this:

https://entnemdept.ufl.edu/creatures/orn/lubber03.jpg

To young lubbers, wherever you are … just stay away from me.

Kate – you’ll see their relatives this year and every year. We have 150 species of cicada in the US, seven of which are periodic. The other 143 emerge after 1+ yr (depending on specie) underground and they overlap. So, cicadas every year, just not swarms.

The cicadas shed their brown, crispy shells as they grew and left them clinging to tree trunks and all over the grass. It got to where you couldn’t walk across the lawn without crunching underfoot. My brothers and I played with the abandoned shells. They’d try to freak me out by hanging them in my hair by their claws, but I was too used to the shells everywhere to care. I’d just scoop some up to throw back at them. Cicada fight! Also, the shells made perfect horror-movie monsters, lined up in rows in the driveway to fight the War of the Worlds against my brothers’ little green plastic Army men.

All in all, it was fun.

That’s a pygmy grasshopper. They’re pretty neat, being only 3/8″ or so.

OK, it’s bed time. Later gaters. This has been fun. I’ll check once in the morning for any other questions.

I haven’t seen the cicada-killers for a while around here. I suppose that if they follow the cicada cycles, then their appearance in numbers in a place is probably also cyclical.

Carnivorous just means eats animal flash. Vultures are carnivorous.

These nocturnal insects use their strong mandibles to feed primarily on dead organic matter but can also eat other insects.

Yeah, they can gather and get squished in enough numbers to become an actual road hazard.

Give me a size. If they swarm, it’s pretty much limited it to either the lubbers or the migratory locusts (Schistocerca). The only one of those I know of with yellow(ish) ‘piping’ is Schistocerca americana and the next.

That’s as close a pic I could find with a snap search. They do come in a wide variety of color hues down to almost black.

My favorite Schistocerca is lineata. That pic doesn’t do it justice as those greens are metallic bronze sheen. Really beautiful. They will swarm and the body can get quite dark.

I’m runnin’ out of genera. 🙂

An FYI on me. At one time (some 30yr ago) I had a mantid collection numbering a thou or so specimens of over six hundred species. Larger than not a few museums by specie count. I moved the collection on to another specialist. I used to have people from all over the world send me shots to identify.

It was pretty cool. (nail buff)

Thank you, folks, thank you. I’ll be here all night. Be sure to tip the blog mistress on your way out.

If we’re talking of the same insect, I think they eat detritus but they certainly can bite hard. But they’re very slow and stupid in my experience.

Where I grew up there was a couple weeks in the year when they’d mass migrate and cover the roads, kind of gross to drive over them.