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Call it a one in a million chance!
Kewana Brooke Fuller, a local 8th grade student at Guy Berry Career Academy, has managed to find a rare pink grasshopper right here in Arkansas.
Pink grasshoppers are extremely rare, with only two previously recorded encounters in Texas and Kansas. The latest pink grasshopper to be found before Fuller’s was by an eight year old boy last month in Arkansas City, Kansas. Before that, Dirk Parker, an Ohio native who was working in Texas found another pink grasshopper in 2022. Before him, another Texas sighting was found by a three year old boy in Austin, Texas.
While most grasshoppers come in shades of green and brown, a rare genetic mutation called erythrism causes a pink shade. That variation, which also causes red hair and freckles in humans, was discovered in a cricket species in 1887. The recessive gene is similar to the one that causes albinism in animals.
Pink grasshoppers are scarce because they don’t usually reach adulthood. Pink is obviously not an ideal color for effective camouflage against predators and they easily get caught. Their brown and green counterparts are able to hide more easily and thus have gone forth and multiplied.
A person has a roughly one percent chance of finding a pink grasshopper in the wild during their lifetime.
Whatever their colors may be, grasshoppers are essential to the ecosystem. While they are widely considered as farm and garden pests, these insects influence plant growth depending on what they consume. When a grasshopper eats a lot of nitrogen-rich plants then dies, the carcass will enrich the soil and help carbohydrate-rich plants to grow.
The opposite happens when they are stressed; they eat carbohydrate-rich plants and when they expire, help produce nitrogen-rich plants instead. Their excrement is also great fertilizer for the soil, easier to break down than that of cow dung.
Grasshoppers also serve as one of the main food sources of many animals including birds, spiders and lizards. Those creatures also play big roles in supporting the ecosystem. If grasshoppers are not in abundance in nature, their food source dwindles down and said creatures will not be able to fulfill their own roles in maintaining a healthy ecosystem.
