GRASSHOPPERS eat foul plants and then throw up over themselves to discourage
lizards from eating them, a biologist in the US has discovered.
Greg Sword of the Northern Plains Agricultural Research Laboratory in Sidney,
Montana, has shown that grasshoppers eat wafer-ash leaves to deter attacks by
green anole lizards. The lizards spit out the vomit-coated insects without
harming them, he reports in a forthcoming issue of Oecologia.
Unlike other insects that make noxious chemicals to squirt at attackers, the
grasshopper’s defence just depends on what it has eaten. “Grasshoppers are like
jelly doughnuts,” Sword says, “only filled with plant toxins…
