13 thoughts on “Name That Animal

  1. I’m going to guess this is some species of tropical tree cricket ~ those long back legs look good for jumping and for use in producing cricket ‘song.’ The long tail bristles might be an adaptation to induce predators to strike at the most obvious, but wrong end of the insect; or they might serve to disperse pheromones, like the (usually hidden) abdominal bristles of certain lepidopteran species.

  2. I’ve got to say, for the first time in a damn long time (since I saw my first pic of a camel spider), I really hope that’s not a real creature, because… it’s just too weird, even for me. I don’t think I want to know what it is, actually. I have my limits to curiosity, I must say.

    1. When I first saw this pic, I thought it was one of those photoshop creations but was so confused as to what it was made out of (a bug and a shaving brush?) that I clicked on it to learn more. After finding similar photos on other sites, I was convinced it was real.

  3. I’m afraid I can’t remember what this guy’s name is. I saw an article a while ago, but my memory is like a sieve. Bristletail something-or-other, I think, but that’s as far as it goes.

    It looks to me like a cartoon saxophone turned into an insect, and dressed in a snazzy suit.

  4. ANSWER TIME

    This is a leafhopper. As Wikipedia explains:

    Leafhopper is a common name applied to any species from the family Cicadellidae. These minute insects, colloquially known as hoppers, are plant feeders that suck plant sap from grass, shrubs, or trees. […] The family is distributed all over the world, and constitutes the second-largest hemipteran family, with at least 20,000 described species.

    As far as which particular leafhopper is pictured above, I *think* it’s a nymph of a leaf hopper (Hemiptera) of the Family Nogodinidae. This was actually very hard to pin down and I hope I got it right. I know someone will chime in if I’m wrong.

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