What Grasshoppers Feed on
Published:16 May2022 Source:University of Würzburg
Anyone walking past a meadow on a mild summer evening is often exposed to an impressive concert. It is the grasshoppers, bush crickets and crickets that create a Mediterranean atmosphere with their chirping. The songs are usually those of males trying to attract females to mate with them. But they can also be rival songs when two males get too close to each other.
In total, there are more than 80 species of Orthoptera in Germany. "Grasshoppers are very important for many open grassland ecosystems," states zoologist Sebastian König from the Biocenter of the Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany: "The insects are an important food source for birds. And as herbivores, they remove up to 30 percent of the plant biomass in a meadow, thus promoting the co-occurrence of many plant species."