Giant red-winged grasshopper
The giant red-winged grasshopper is one of the biggest grasshoppers in the world. Its body is brownish green, but when it flies it flashes bright red wings. A big female can be as long as your hand.
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Fun facts
The very biggest ones can grow to 14.5 centimetres long, with wings 24 centimetres across.
The young ones cannot fly yet. They stay together in groups.
The young are striped dark and yellow. Those bright colours warn hungry animals that they are probably poisonous.
A mother lays a bag of up to 100 eggs in the soil.
It has a cousin in South America with blue wings instead of red ones.
Most asked questions about Giant red-winged grasshopper
?How big is the giant red-winged grasshopper?
Males are about 5.5 to 7 centimetres long and females 7 to 12 centimetres. The biggest reach 14.5 centimetres.
?Why does it have red wings?
The red wings only show when it flies, and that is how it got its name. The exact shade of red is a little different from one grasshopper to the next.
?What does it eat?
It eats the leaves of many different plants.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Tropidacris cristata
- Named by
- Linnaeus, 1758
- Group
- Grasshoppers and crickets
- Family
- Romaleidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Orthoptera > Romaleidae
- Lives on
- North America, South America
Where the facts come from
- Tropidacris cristata (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 Paul Harrison. CC BY-SA 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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