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close encounter of the third kind Here he is! Alien! Extraterrestrial! I was able to take a picture of him! Well, no big surprises as far as general appear- ance. It looks like one from the sci-fi movies - maybe director(s) saw one of them also. Well, he does look somewhat small [ROLLOVER].Now, seriously: it’s a nymph’s shell of a grasshopper. Not an extraterrestrial, but my encounter was of that kind: a grasshopper was coming out of the shell in front of our eyes and in some twenty minutes he was at least three times the size of the shell, close to 50 mm, stretching and drying his wings, transparent pair in particular (which were milky white at the beginning). Would you believe that crickets and grasshoppers have multiple nymphal stages, some of them up to twelve (!!). Isn’t that an indication that they are extraterrestrial if they need so many transformat- ions to get accustomed into that unfriendly Earth’s environment? Too bad I didn’t take photos of the bug - I’ve killed it before it could take off. Grasshoppers are nasty pests in our garden and I kill them at any age. The nymph’s shell is documented, here. |
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