Short-horned Grasshoppers (Acrididae)

Latin Name	Observation Date	Location
Acrididae	Sep 25, 2026	Natore, Bangladesh

This beautiful insect sitting calmly on the green leaves of the tree is basically a type of grasshopper. Its body color blends in so perfectly with the green of the leaves that there is no way to tell at a glance that there is an animal sitting there. Let's find out more about this insect hiding in the leaves.

​Scientific name:
In the scientific world, they are specifically known as short-horned grasshoppers or short-horned grasshoppers.
​Family and genus:
According to the classification of the animal kingdom, this insect mainly belongs to the Acrididae family. It is the most important and largest family of grasshoppers under the Caelifera suborder. Under this vast family, there are numerous subfamilies and thousands of genera, including Acridinae, Calliptaminae, and Catantopinae.

​Habitat and Habitat:
They are a very widespread insect around the world. They are mainly found in almost every continent of the world, including Asia, Africa, America and Europe. They naturally live and breed in open agricultural lands, rice fields, fallow pastures or orchards of our country.

​Food and Nutrition:
These grasshoppers are completely herbivorous in nature. They mainly live by eating young leaves of various trees, grasses, vines and crop tops. When they are prevalent in gardens or crop fields, they quickly eat the new leaves of the trees and take nutrients.

​Shape and Lifestyle:
As you can see in the picture, the body color of this grasshopper is bright green and the antennae at the front of its head are relatively small and somewhat thick. One of the strange features of their physical structure is that they have a special hearing organ called the tympana right next to the first segment of their abdomen. With the help of this tympana, they can hear the sounds around them. Since their body color matches the color of the leaves, they can easily hide from predators.

​Benefits:
In the food chain of nature, they play a role in the ecosystem by being used as natural food for other large animals, birds, or garden predatory spiders. However, they have no direct benefit at all in agriculture or orchards.

​Disadvantages:
In agriculture, they are known as quite harmful insects or pests. They attack crops or gardens and cause serious damage by eating the leaves of trees. Although it may sound surprising, it is true that the extremely harmful and dangerous locusts that move in swarms are also part of the Acrididae family, which can destroy large fields of crops in an instant. Since I have China Three lemon, Malta, and Nagpur orange trees in my own garden, if I see such grasshoppers on the young leaves of the trees, I have to be a little careful and take measures to control them.

I learned about them from various sites including iNaturalist, Wikipedia and Google.

_{​(All posts are written in Bengali and translated into English using Google Translate.)}

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Camera Used	Samsung SM-G973F
F-Stop	F2.4
ISO speed	ISO
Focal length	26mm
Flash	No
Editing app	Lightroom
Photography	(Acrididae)
Photographer	@mshbd
Location	Natore, Bangladesh

Link to original community
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/404638126

Latitude	Longitude	Map Link
24.3360	89.1130	https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=12/24.3360/89.1130