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May/June 2002 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Inside Story Feature: Grasshoppers À la carte Mosaic Reverberations

Friend or foe? | It’s a bug’s life | Grasshopper facts | Grasshopper anatomy
Grasshoppers on film | Nature’s symphony | Literary hoppers | Archives

Dan Johnson holds 50 million years of evolution between his forefinger and thumb. "It’s Psoloessa delicatula, the brown-spotted range grasshopper," he says. "A female. See?" The entomologist upends the small, delicately barred insect and gently squeezes its abdomen until four dark prongs poke out. "She uses those to dig herself into the ground when she lays her eggs … she buries them wrapped in foam.

"What a little gem," he says as he watches the insect whirl away from his hand. "I didn’t expect it to be so good out here. This is a great day for grasshoppers!"

Johnson, Canada’s leading expert on the ecology and control of grasshoppers, has driven half an hour east of Lethbridge, Alta., to a scrubby expanse of native grassland splatted with cow-pies and frazzled by the sun. A youthful 48, with a runner’s lean build, he moves across the pasture with birdlike energy, his large white net flapping at the end of a long handle. From a distance, he resembles a child chasing butterflies. If good science is mostly play disguised as work, as biologist E. O. Wilson once said, this has all the hallmarks of good science.

As we step across the close-cropped thatch of blue grama and needle-and-thread grass, grasshoppers spurt away from our feet in silver arcs. To the untutored eye, they are mere blurs of motion, but to Johnson, a research scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Lethbridge, these brief sightings are vivid with detail.

"Did you see that?" he says, his face alight with delight. "A male Arphia conspersa, the speckled rangeland grasshopper, with the blood-red wings. And look at that Eritettix simplex. Did you see its body? Bright lime-green. That is a beautiful grasshopper."

A beautiful grasshopper? Don’t let them catch you saying that downtown on coffee row! To generations of prairie farmers and ranchers, grasshoppers have looked like nothing but trouble, ugly little chewing machines whose mouthparts are perfectly adapted to take a bite out of the bottom line. Where is the beauty in creatures that can cut through pastures and croplands like a Biblical plague until, as the book of Exodus puts it, "not a green thing" remains?

For Johnson, the beauty is much deeper than body colour. He understands better than most how grasshoppers work and is driven to improving pest-control technologies and finding innovative ways for these orthopterans to coexist with people who view them simply as marauders that should be destroyed.

For the rest of this story, visit your local newsstand or go to our store to buy this issue.

Candace Savage is a writer based in Saskatoon, Sask.