WE CONCLUDED our report on grasshoppers that play football with their faeces with the words “now that this aspect of the grasshopper lifestyle has been so thoroughly investigated, putative authors searching for an original topic will just have to find something else” (30 April).
We were reckoning without Jon Richfield, the legendary South African who has answered many more Last Word questions than anyone else on the planet (91av, 9 October 2010, p 50).
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“I think that you were either over pessimistic or over optimistic,” Jon admonishes us in an email headed “grasshopper strikers”: “There seems to be an entire field of investigation open to ecologists, entomologists, and biological engineers of various stripes. To begin with, I observe that the confusing name Atractomorpha applies to a genus of algae as well as the genus of grasshoppers in the family Pyrgomorphidae, those rather gormless, pinheaded grasshoppers common in long grass and vegetable patches.
“I did not realise that these grasshoppers engaged in this activity, but more decades ago than I am willing to confess to, I observed frass (faeces) kicking in a charming member of the family Pamphagidae, one of the excellently camouflaged ‘toad grasshoppers’. I find them irresistible and had a female in my office-cum-lab.
“Pamphagids in general are far more robust than the pyrgomorphids, and the first I knew of their habit was finding a pellet puzzlingly situated in a glass beaker in the middle of my office. The next day something ricocheted across my office and later I picked up a pellet on the floor.
“Only a day or two later did I catch her in the act, and a very neat one-legged performance did she make of it. Your report talks of distances of 252 and 487 millimetres. If my lab walls had not been in the way, my little lady would casually have done more like 10 metres.
“Apart from the question of establishing which family of orthopterans holds the South African turd-kicking record, there is the observation that both Pyrgomorphidae and Pamphagidae tend to be sedentary, camouflaged families of grasshoppers. No doubt this fabrication of hard, dry, streamlined pellets that get kicked far away would be an adaptation to avoid leaving clues to their presence.”
Thank you for that, Jon, and our apologies that we don’t have space for your additional observations on “” among caterpillars.
“The instructions on the packet of Simon Howie fruit pudding that Michael Smith bought advised: “Defrost thoroughly before cooking in a refrigerator”
MILITANT atheists will be delighted by a Google news alert about a “dangerous god seized by police in Gipsy Hill”. This was Google’s headline on a story credited to the Streatham Guardian, which covers the neighbourhood of that name in south London.
A few more operations of that kind could save all sorts of trouble in various parts of the world, some might think… if only the story had not been downgraded to mere canine custody in the Streatham Guardian .
Beethoven’sposthumous symphonies
READER Peter Hambleton was just one of several who commented on our story about the number of symphonies Beethoven composed “in his lifetime” (21 May).
“We can be sure,” Peter says, “that none were written after his death since then he would be decomposing.”
Ouch! Then Victor Eijkhout asserts that “Ludwig composed nine symphonies during his lifetime and a tenth and eleventh after his death, passed on to us by the spiritualist Rosemary Brown.”
Typing this name into a search engine produces “about” 13,600,000 results. Many confirm that during the latter part of the 20th century Brown supposedly “channelled” music by numerous composers, of whom Beethoven was just one.
Now all we need to know about is the music Beethoven composed before he was born.
Now that is what we call bright
THIS, John Morton thinks, must be one of the biggest superlatives ever.
in Astronomy magazine online announces that astronomers at the University of Texas McDonald Observatory have discovered a “super-luminous supernova”.
“Supernova 2008am is 3.7 billion light-years away,” we are told. “At its peak luminosity, it was over 100 billion times brighter than the sun.”
Just how bright is that, exactly? Astronomy explains: “It emitted enough energy in one second to satisfy the power needs of the United States for one million times longer than the universe has existed.”
So it was quite bright, then.
FINALLY, a mystery from the north of England. As his train passed Wakefield in Yorkshire, Paul Barker tried to connect his laptop to the train’s Wi-Fi, only to find the login telling him: “No map contains our current position.”
“Where the hell were we?” he asks.
Feedback guesses the train was entering the hitherto unsuspected Wakefield triangle.