What Do Grasshoppers Eat? Grasses, Leaves and Crops

The basic grasshopper diet

Grasshoppers belong to the suborder Caelifera, about 11,000 species of short-horned grasshoppers and locusts. They are among the oldest living groups of chewing plant-eaters, with fossils going back about 250 million years. Nearly all of them feed on living plants.

What they eat depends on the species and on what grows where they live. Typical foods include:

• Grasses, including wild grasses and cereal crops such as wheat, barley, oats, maize and rice
• Forbs, meaning broad-leaved, non-woody plants such as clover, dandelions, sunflowers and goldenrod
• Flowers, seeds and seed heads
• Leaves of shrubs and young trees
• Garden vegetables such as lettuce, beans and cabbage

Grasshoppers get almost all the water they need from these fresh plants, so they rarely need to drink.

Grass feeders, forb feeders and generalists

Entomologists divide grasshoppers into broad feeding groups. Grass feeders, sometimes called graminivores, eat mainly grasses and sedges. Many of the common meadow grasshoppers of Europe, such as the common field grasshopper (Chorthippus brunneus), belong here.

Forb feeders prefer broad-leaved plants and often avoid grasses. Some North American species specialize on plants in the daisy family, such as snakeweed and rabbitbrush.

Mixed feeders, or generalists, eat both grasses and forbs. Many of the spur-throated grasshoppers in the genus Melanoplus, such as the two-striped and red-legged grasshoppers of the United States, are generalists that can switch to crops and garden plants when wild food runs short.

Specialist grasshoppers and toxic plants

A small number of grasshoppers are true specialists that eat only one or a few kinds of plants. Some feed on plants that are poisonous to most other animals. The aak grasshopper (Poekilocerus pictus) of India and Pakistan feeds on milkweed-family plants of the genus Calotropis and stores their bitter toxins in its body. Its bright yellow, blue and red colors warn predators that it tastes bad.

Large, slow lubber grasshoppers of the southeastern United States also have warning colors and can produce a smelly, irritating foam when handled, which helps protect them from birds and lizards.

How grasshoppers eat

A grasshopper’s mouthparts are built for biting and chewing. A pair of hard jaws called mandibles moves sideways, cutting and grinding plant tissue. Smaller mouthparts called maxillae and labium hold the food, and short feelers called palps taste it before the grasshopper takes a bite. Grasshoppers also taste with sense organs on their feet and antennae.

Food passes into the crop, a storage pouch where digestion of carbohydrates begins, and then into the midgut where proteins are digested. Plant leaves are low in protein, so grasshoppers eat a lot of them. Some species can choose plants to balance their diet, eating more protein-rich food when they need it.

Do grasshoppers eat meat?

Grasshoppers do not hunt, but many are opportunists. They readily eat dead insects, including dead grasshoppers, which give them extra protein and salts. Captive grasshoppers will nibble a wide range of foods. Crowded locusts in marching bands sometimes bite and even eat each other, and this cannibalism helps keep the band moving forward, as explained in why do locusts swarm?

So grasshoppers are best described as herbivores with occasional scavenging, not as omnivores in the way crickets are. Crickets, which belong to the other main branch of the order Orthoptera, eat far more animal food. The differences are covered in grasshopper vs cricket.

How much does a locust eat?

The champion eaters are the swarming locusts. An adult desert locust weighs about 2 g (0.07 oz) and eats roughly its own weight of fresh plants each day. It is polyphagous, eating leaves, shoots, flowers, fruit, seeds and bark of almost any plant, including millet, sorghum, maize, barley, rice, cotton, date palms and fruit trees.

Because a swarm holds about 40–80 million locusts in each square kilometer, the totals are enormous. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that a swarm covering 1 square kilometer can eat as much food in a day as about 35,000 people. That is why locust upsurges, such as the 2019–2022 event in East Africa and southwest Asia, threaten the food supply of millions of people.

Grasshoppers as food for other animals

Grasshoppers turn plants into protein, and many animals depend on them. Birds such as kestrels, shrikes and meadowlarks, lizards, frogs, spiders, mantises and small mammals all eat grasshoppers. Praying mantises are particularly skilled grasshopper hunters, as shown in what do praying mantises eat? In many parts of the world, including Mexico, Africa and Asia, people eat grasshoppers too.

Myths and facts

Myth: grasshoppers spit tobacco juice. When handled, many grasshoppers release a brown liquid from their mouths. It is partly digested plant food, used as a defense to deter predators, not tobacco.

Fact: grasshoppers can hurt crops even in normal years. On the rangelands of the western United States, grasshoppers compete with cattle for grass, and in hot, dry summers their numbers can grow large enough to strip pastures.