Grasshoppers
 
Grasshopper Movement in a Cypress Dome


    In the cypress dome ecosystem, there was not much obvious animal life besides birds and fish.  The water was quite low compared to normal because the drydown was in the process of happening.  There was a pair of rusty blackbirds that flitted from place to place, and were quite hard to observe.  I chose some grasshoppers instead.  There was a colony of them situated on the grass near the edge of the cypress dome.
    They seemed to be situated mostly on the tips of grass or on stalks parallel to the ground.  Many of them moved slowly around, crawling over each other to get to where they wanted to go, but most of them sat on the grass for several minutes before moving a little bit.  They were of vastly different sizes, with the bigger ones generally having yellow stripes and the small ones often possessing orange stripes.  It appeared that the big ones were usually the ones that climbed over the little ones, and not vice versa. From what I observed, the one climbing over also usually started from the tail of the other grasshopper rather than the head.  When two or more were on opposite sides of the same stalk, they were continually shifting their feet to find places to put them. Two of them seemed to be eating a white flower, but after they had left it, it didn't look any different, or chewed on, etc.
    The main observation I made is that they seemed to be gradually moving from the grass in the sun to the grass in the shade.  When I left, there were only three that were directly in the sun.  However, this could also be due to my presence in the sun that caused them to move away from me, and that happened to involve moving into the shade.  When I moved nearer to them, they moved around a bit more, as if startled.  They also moved to the tops of the stalks, away from the shorter pieces of grass.
    An interesting experiment would be to see if they really do prefer the shade over the sun in the midday.  One could see what percentage of them were in the shade or the sun based on the time of day.  It would also be interesting to see how the presence of humans affected their direction of movement.  A group of people could circle them or stand in different places around them and observe their subsequent movements.