Woman Takes Picture Of Extremely Rare Pink Grasshopper While Gardening

Sep 02, 2019 by apost team

Kate Cully, 41, was working in her grandmother’s garden when she saw something surprising: a pink grasshopper. She managed to take a picture of the brightly colored insect. She was surprised to see a grasshopper that color.

Other people have found pink grasshoppers before. In 2013, researcher Victoria Hillman wrote a blog post for “National Geographic” in which she described how she and her colleagues found six pink grasshoppers.

Like Culley, Hillman had been surprised. She hadn’t even known that pink grasshoppers existed, much less that they could be found in the wild. Pink grasshoppers’ coloring is what makes them rare, as the bright pink makes them stand out against the green foliage, so they are easy prey for predators.

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Hillman said it was rare for a pink grasshopper to survive to adulthood. In fact, the six she had found were all nymphs or juveniles.

Pink grasshoppers owe their coloring to a mutation called erythrism. Like albinism, erythrism is caused by a recessive gene, which means both parents must have the gene in order to produce offspring with the abnormal coloring, so Hillman’s pink grasshoppers were probably siblings.

While a creature with albinism is born with no pigment, a creature with erythrism has too much red pigment. The first reported pink insect was a katydid found in 1887. Katydids, for the record, belong to the same order as grasshoppers, the Orthoptera.

According to Hillman, pink grasshoppers sometimes lose their bright pink color as they approach adulthood. They may either develop normal coloring or a color somewhere between hot pink and the normal green or brown that grasshoppers usually sport.

Have you heard of pink grasshoppers or maybe even seen one? Tell us what you think of this story in the comments and be sure to pass this article along to your friends and family.