Brown planthopper
The brown planthopper is a tiny brown bug that lives on rice plants. It sucks the juice out of the stems, and when there are lots of them the rice turns yellow and dries up. Because rice feeds about half the people in the world, farmers keep a close eye on it.
How fast is it?
Fun facts
Some brown planthoppers have long wings and some have short ones. The long-winged ones are the travellers that fly off to find new rice fields.
They ride on the wind and can travel all the way from one country to another.
The babies hatch cottony white and turn purple brown within an hour.
A short-winged mother can lay 300 to 350 eggs, tucked in a neat line inside a rice leaf.
Using too much bug spray can actually make more of them, because it also kills the spiders that eat them.
Most asked questions about Brown planthopper
?What does the brown planthopper eat?
It sucks the juice from rice plants.
?Why is the brown planthopper a problem?
It dries out rice plants and spreads plant diseases, and rice is the main food for about half the people in the world.
?What eats brown planthoppers?
Spiders that live in rice fields are some of their main enemies.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Nilaparvata lugens
- Named by
- Stål, 1854
- Group
- True bugs and cicadas
- Family
- Delphacidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hemiptera > Delphacidae
- Lives on
- Asia, Australia and Oceania
Where the facts come from
- Brown planthopper (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by portioid. CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at hello@bugwiki.app and we will fix it.
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