My daughter spotted this Elegant Grasshopper while I was busy taking photographs of some wild yellow flowers which caught my eye while driving through the countryside. It was hard to capture it because the grasshopper kept moving as I came closer but I was lucky to get this shot.
There are over 15 000 species of grasshoppers in the world. You get two kinds of grasshoppers: the long-horned and short-horned, this one is short horned and about 5 cm long.
The Elegant Grasshopper is a very attractive insect with its black and yellow abdomen and orange eyes. This grasshopper can leap twenty times its own body as it uses its long hind legs to catapult but it cannot really fly and has no need to.
Bright coloured insects are poisons and when you squash this one it gives off a foul odour. The Elegant grasshoppers is a pest in South Africa as it can destroy crops.
This photo was taken with a Samsung S7.