STARKVILLE, Miss. (AP) — A Mississippi State University entomologist has a grasshopper bonanza.
The Smithsonian Institution is lending part of its grasshopper collection — 32,000 hoppers in all — to the Mississippi Entomological Museum, thanks to JoVonn Hill, a research associate with the Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station.
“I’ve been working with the grasshoppers of the Southeast for 10 years, collecting and studying the species, with the goal of writing a book about them,” Hill said. “There are at least 160 species of grasshoppers currently known to live in the Southeastern United States. I can gather a lot of historical and biological information from this collection to aid my research.”
In return for use of the collection, Hill will update its labels, identify unknown specimens, and add new specimens, making sure similar specimens are grouped together. Few grasshoppers have been added since the 1970s, so Hill will contribute to this collection when he gathers insects for the MSU’s.
Having the collection available will draw visiting researchers, especially as ongoing drought conditions increase national interest in grasshoppers, said Richard Brown, director of the Mississippi Entomological Museum.
Many species look so much alike that scientists must dissect them and examine their complex internal genitalia under a microscope to identify them. Then they photograph and reassemble the insect, with the identifying parts in a little vial alongside.
“When you do this, you’re actually adding information to the specimen because you’ve made more of the specimen visible,” Hill said.
Some of the specimens Hill will dissect are a century or more old. The dried specimens must be soaked overnight in warm water before dissection.
The grasshoppers were not on display at the Museum of Natural History but kept at an off-site support center, Hill said.
Other collections away from the capital on renewable five-year loans include Smithsonian collections of lightning bugs in Florida, mantids in Ohio and scarabs in Nebraska.
Hill had worked with the grasshopper collection in Washington, D.C., and asked for the loan when he learned no one was currently working with it.
The insects, many with hand-written labels, are pinned into 150 air-tight, glass-topped drawers. Newer tags are typed in a tiny 4-point font.
The Smithsonian collection contains several specimens of the now-extinct Rocky Mountain grasshopper, which plagued early Midwestern pioneers. It was often called a locust, which Hill said is what a grasshopper population becomes when it reaches swarm numbers.
They were a major reason the U.S. Department of Agriculture created its division of entomology, Brown said.
“The Rocky Mountain locust is the only extinct North American grasshopper species known,” Hill said. “Although it was devastating to settlers, it was a big part of the ecosystem, eating grasses and being eaten by birds. This collection has intact specimens and a few grasshoppers found frozen on top of a mountain in Montana.”
