When I stopped by the grocery store yesterday to pick up some chips and salsa (habanero style but never quite spicy enough), I saw these two horse lubber grasshoppers mating.  This species is Taeniopoda eques and they’re huge critters (the female, the bigger one, was nearly as long as my hand)!  During late-monsoon time around Tucson they’re everywhere - it’s really quite amazing.  Often times they get run over by cars and occasionally they’re seen by the hundreds on the road up to the Santa Rita Mountains. Usually an individual gets run over and another comes to feed on its dead carcass, and then that one gets run over too (and so on).  Like most grasshoppers, they’re typically thought of herbivores.  However, they’re probably better classified as omnivores because of their cannibalistic tendencies and scavenger lifestyle.  What’s fascinating is that T. eques is chemically defended by toxins obtained from its diet.  The hoppers also have nice aposematic colors in orange and yellow to announce their noxiousness.  While feeding on one of their own, they don’t appear to mind the toxins and seem to happily munch away.  Maybe they’re immune to their own toxins?  Or maybe they provide a little spicy flavor like the habanero pepper in my salsa?  Mmmm, chemical defenses!!

This is a neat article that was recently published about opportunistic carnivory in the eastern lubber grasshopper (Romalea microptera) in Annals of the Entomological Society of America.

As a companion to the article, the authors put together this great video on YouTube, entitled “The Pharate Carnivore.”