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| Adult male | Adult female |
Common name - Crenulated grasshopper (Helfer, 1972).
Geographic distribution - found from Montana and the Dakotas south to Texas and west to Wyoming, Nevada and California (Otte, 1981). Its Colorado range is from the plains to the eastern mountan foothills as high as 8,000 ft. and includes some of the western slope (Gillette, 1904; Hebard, 1929).
Habitat - dry grass areas (Gillette, 1904).
Food habits - graminivorous (Brooks, 1958). Its preferred food is blue grama. It also feeds on sand dropseed, wheatgrass, threadleaf sedge, needleandthread, sunsedge and threeawn (Hewitt, 1977; Joern, 1979a; Kumar et al., 1976).
Nymph - five instars (Brusven, 1967).
Adult - small size. General color is brownish-yellow. Face is
slightly slanted back. Antennae are slender. Dorsal posterior edge of pronotum
is rounded. Brown lateral stripes start at the vertex of the head, pass
through the eye and widen toward the back of the head. The stripes continue
along the lateral lobes of the pronotum and the sides of the thorax, curve
downward and stop at the attachment of the middle femur. The head has a
brown dorsal stripe. Tegmina are opaque with a conspicuous brown stripe
that has a very definite and wavy margin. Hind femora and tibiae are buff
colored. Hind femora has a brown stripe on the outer side. Male length,
13 mm; female, 18 mm (Brooks, 1958).
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| Tegmen | Pronotum (Top view) |
Seasonal history - eggs overwinter. Adults are present from late June to mid-September (Gillette, 1904; Pfadt, 1972).
Abundance and importance - common on the prairie (Tinkham, 1948). In Arizona it has been known to seriously hinder reseeding of range grasses (Helfer, 1963). In Kansas, however, it is not economically important (Brusven, 1967).
C. crenulata fact sheet from the Field Guide
to Common Western Grasshoppers
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Biology of Common Colorado Grasshoppers
Grasshoppers of Colorado Contents