Festive

Grasshoppers vary greatly in colour and pattern within species, but according to Evans and Edmondson's Grasshoppers & Crickets of Britain & Ireland, it's the females that have the widest variation. They go on to say: "Many grasshopper species have an addition of magenta to their colouring. According to the shade this may give the insect a colour ranging from pink to burgundy or almost black." It still surprises me that so many grasshoppers are at least partially pink, but when I went to Tilly's field this morning with the specific aim of finding a pink specimen, it took me just a few minutes to came up with this female Meadow Grasshopper.

Every now and then someone makes their local news by finding an entirely pink individual - a genetic mutation known as erythrism, in which the pink colour is overproduced, while production of other colours is suppressed. These "once in a lifetime" finds are usually nymphs, and it's often stated that they're so vulnerable to predation that they rarely make it to adulthood, though another possibility is that many of them naturally darken in colour as they mature. In any case, the pink colouration appears to be controlled by a dominant gene, so a pink or partially pink specimen like this female will be likely to pass on its Barbie outfit to its offspring.

Shortly after I returned to the homestead with my festive grasshopper safely bagged, the Cardiff branch of the family arrived for the weekend. By this time the heat was almost intolerable, and we all spent much of the rest of the day sitting in the shade of the gazebo R and I put up on the top lawn yesterday. The Boy Wonder was allowed to fill the paddling pool with a hosepipe himself, which activity looked set to be the highlight of his thirty two months on the planet so far, until R also produced a bubble gun and taught him how to use it. 

The highlight of R's sixty eight years on the planet so far may just have been the moment when he was instructed to spray a covering of bubbles along the edge of the paddling pool, and failed to do it in the way the Boy wanted. B reached for the bubble gun, saying, "Let me show you." He then sprayed some bubbles himself, before handing the gun back to R and asking, "Now - do you think you could try to do that?"