Grazing in the Grass
Serving Suggestion: Prior to reading the paragraphs below, click here and open in a new window or tab. Turn up your sound.
While the grasses themselves had lost much of their orderly beauty and subtle color before the pasture was cut a few days ago, the insect inhabitants had begun to appear there in myriad abundance as the long warm days incubated eggs into larva, and pupae into adults. Earlier in the week, I steered the truck along the edge of the pasture to beat down a walking path through the high grass--as high as the top of my windshield. I navigated by the sky, not able to see the ground in front of me. When I got back to the barn, the hood of the truck was an entomological treasure trove--leafhoppers, spittlebugs, cinch bugs and grasshoppers--hundreds of grasshoppers like the one you see here.
A week before, I had watched and photographed this very type of small green grasshopper on a tall stem of grass. It moved methodically along the flower spike using its long antennae (several times the length of the body) to flick the pollen-heavy anthers. The male grass's sex organs hung dangling like tiny salt shakers, waiting for a gentle breeze to carry sperm (inside the ornately-sculpted pollen grain) to a female flower yards or miles away.
You can see some pollen grains floating away in this small image, as well as some of it on the grasshopper's antennae. And what I wish I'd taken the time to discover was whether these grasshoppers use their antennae intentionally to gather pollen. Some insects can pull their antennae through their mouths to clean them of mites and such. Could it be that in these very common pasture-dwelling grasshoppers, the antennae are used to collect pollen and then bring it to their mouths? This would explain the ridiculously long appendages, wouldn't it? And this relationship, then, would be a 'mutualism', helping both the insect (providing food) and the grass (pollen dispersal, costing only a few grains in payment to the insect for the service.)
But I'll not find the answer to this mystery this year. The grasses--along, most certainly, with a hundred thousand entombed long-eared grasshoppers--are now wrapped in tight round bales, stored under a barn roof up on Griffith Creek. I'll just have to wait until next July to confirm my antennae-as-feeding-hands hypothesis.