Hi All, Well, I did think this was a grasshopper until Peter W set me straight! Look at the huge antennae. It flew onto my Jeep driver window after a lovely Fall walk along the Mel DeAnna trail, in late September. But when I first saw the insect, it was totally brown. I thought that this grasshopper would blow off the window as I drove, and come to no harm. Then it quickly started to turn bright green, as I could see out of the corner of my eye, starting at the top of the back, spreading downwards onto the legs, taking no more than a couple of minutes. I could actually see the green move down the legs. It folded its rear legs over its wings as I accelerated to 90 km/h, but did not blow off the vehicle, moving its legs back into normal position as the speed dropped to 50 entering Castlegar. The sun was very bright and shining directly on the insect. I found both of these behaviors very interesting. A quick Google search seemed to imply that katydids come in different colours, with no mention of a change in colour. While I thought it was a grasshopper, I looked for reference to the change in colour and was directed to a scientific paper from Europe, where the researchers were aware of colour change in one species of grasshopper, but failed to observe it in the laboratory. Regarding the folding of the legs over the wings in a gale force wind, that is really remarkable. Somewhere in their history the ancestors must have lived in very windy places. The story has a happy ending, I think. The creature was still on my window when I parked the car only 2-3 km as the Katydid flies from the Mel D’Anna trail, but had disappeared an hour later. Of course one of my avian friends may have felt like eating greens for lunch. Who knows? - Peter McIver, West Kootenay Naturalist
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Thanks to club member and entomologist Peter Wood for identifying this creature as an adult Square-headed Snakefly of the Inocelliidae family, found only in the USA and Western Canada. Its larvae are usually found under bark, and adults and larvae alike feed on soft-bodied insects.
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June 2023
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