Fun facts about hoppers and graters

If you ever wonder what just catapulted out of the grass, or is driving you mad, grating louder than a lawnmower, here’s how to tell your crickets from your grasshoppers and cicadas.

Crickets (Grillons) 

• Lifespan: about 2-3 months, 6 weeks of which are spent as adults (except mole crickets which can live up to 3 years) 

• Diet: Omnivorous – insect larvae, aphids, flowers, seeds, leaves, fruit and grasses 

• Antennae (of wingless nymphs and winged adults) are always very long 

• Hearing mechanisms are in their forelegs 

• Males create their “song” by rubbing their wings together, and they mostly sing at night 

• If you want to know the outside temperature, apparently you can count the number of times a cricket chirps in one minute, divide that by 4 and add 40. Or you can check the thermometer! 

• In China they are a sign of good luck. Much money is gambled on cricket fights

Grasshoppers (Sauterelles) 

• Lifespan: 12 months 

• Diet: Vegetarian – mostly leaves but also flowers, stems and seeds. They eat about half their body weight per day 

• Antennae are always quite short (compared with those of crickets) 

• Hearing mechanisms are on their bellies 

• Males create their “song” by rubbing hind legs against their wings 

• They can spit a brown liquid to deter predators 

• Like crickets, those long back legs are designed to catapult them to great distances (equivalent to a football pitch for humans), but adults can also fly of course 

Cicadas (Cigales) 

• Lifespan: about 2-4 years for our species. Only about 5 weeks of which are spent in adult form. Eggs are laid in holes in twigs and branches. Once hatched, nymphs drop to the ground and bury themselves in the earth. After a few years, when the soil temperature is high enough, they emerge from underground and climb a tree, where they shed their exoskeleton for the last time. Now in their winged, adult form, their sole purpose is to mate. 

• Diet: Trees – nutrients from tree roots as nymphs and sap from twigs and branches as adults 

• Antennae are very short 

• Hearing mechanisms are at the base of the abdomen 

• Males create their ear-splitting, incessant racket by contracting drum-like plates inside their abdomen 300-400 times a second. At 100+ decibels, it just isn’t cricket, is it, when you’re trying to snooze after lunch. There’s a myth in Provence that the cicada was sent by God to disrupt peasants’ siestas and stop them from growing too lazy. If you’re a female cicada, however, you’ll flick your wings to show you’re interested! 

• They can only sing when the air temperature is high enough (rendering their internal drum kit suitably elastic). Which is why you rarely hear them here before July, and only during daytime. If it rains or the sun goes in, blessed silence falls. 

• They don’t have long legs for jumping. Adults don’t even walk well, but fly if they need to move more than a few centimetres