It's already mid-July. According to meteorology, the dog days have just begun, but in fact, the heat has come ahead of the calendar. For several weeks, it has been extremely hot.

Tonight, the village is holding a party to celebrate the National Day.

The village children were jumping around a huge fire. I vaguely saw the fire reflected on the bell tower of the church, and the drums were accompanied by the "brush" sound of the fireworks of "Diamond Monkey". At this time, I was alone in the cool breeze around 9 o'clock in the evening, hiding in the dark and listening to the cheerful concert in the fields. This is a concert to celebrate the harvest.

it's getting late, and the cicadas stop singing.

During the whole day, they enjoy the sunshine and heat, and they can't stop singing. When night comes, they have to rest, but they are often disturbed.

in the dense branches of the buttonwood tree, there will suddenly be a muffled sound like a whine, short and piercing.

This is the desperate cry of cicada disturbed by the sudden attack of green grasshopper. The green grasshopper is a fierce hunter at night. It pounces on the cicada, hugs it in the middle, gut it, and takes its heart out.

after singing and dancing, it turned out to be killing.

green grasshoppers don't seem to be common in my neighborhood.

Last year, I planned to study this insect, but I never found it, so I had to ask a forester for help. He finally helped me get two pairs of green grasshoppers from Lagarde Plateau.

It is a cold area, and beeches are now beginning to grow to Wangdu Peak.

Good luck always plays a trick before smiling at the persevering.

The green grasshopper, which was not seen in for a long time to find last year, can be found almost everywhere this summer.

I can catch them as many as I want without going out of my narrow garden.

every night, I hear them chirping among the dense bushes and grasses.

seize this good opportunity, it's now or never.

since June, I've put enough pairs of green grasshoppers I've caught in a bell-shaped cover with a metal mesh. Below it is a crock with a layer of sand as the bottom.

This beautiful insect is simply wonderful, with a light green body and two pale white ribbons on its sides.

it is graceful, light and healthy, with a pair of big wings, and it is the most elegant and beautiful among grasshoppers.

I'm proud of catching such prisoners.

what will they tell me? Wait and see.

they must be fed well now.

I feed lettuce leaves to these prisoners.

they are really biting, but they eat very little, and they don't care to eat.

I soon figured it out: I raise guys who are not willing to be vegetarian.

they need something else, and it seems that they want to catch live food.

but what kind of live food is it? An accidental opportunity happened to let me know what it was.

at dawn, I was strolling in front of the door when something fell from a buttonwood tree next to me and it was still squeaking.

I rushed forward.

It's a grasshopper hollowing out the belly of a cicada it caught.

The cicada cries and struggles in vain, but the grasshopper keeps biting it, plunges its head deep into the cicada's viscera and pulls it out bit by bit.

I see: The grasshopper attacked while the cicada was resting in the high part of the tree in the early morning. The attacked cicada was suddenly startled, and then the attacker and the attacked one twisted into a ball and fell down.

after that, I have seen this similar massacre scene many times.

I've even seen a grasshopper with extraordinary courage jump up to chase cicadas that are dizzy and flying for their lives, just like a goshawk chasing larks in the sky.

compared with the grasshopper with extraordinary courage, the raptor is slightly inferior.

The goshawk specializes in animals weaker than itself, while locusts, on the other hand, attack behemoths much bigger and stronger than themselves, and the result of this hand-to-hand combat is that the smaller one will surely win.

Grasshoppers have extremely strong jaws and claws, and rarely do not gut their opponents, while the latter, because they have no weapons, can only wail and struggle.

the important thing is to hold the prey, which is not difficult. You can do it while the prey is taking a nap at night.

Any cicada that is hit by a fierce grasshopper patrolling at night will inevitably die tragically.

This is understandable. Why, when the night is quiet and cicadas stop chirping, sometimes you suddenly hear squeaky screams coming from the canopy.

It was a robber dressed in light green who just caught a sleeping cicada.

I found what my diners needed: I fed them cicadas.

They found this dish very appetizing, so in two or three weeks, my cage was a mess, with cicada heads, empty chests, broken wings and claws everywhere.

Only the belly is almost completely gone.

The belly is a good piece of meat. Although the nutrition is not high, it looks delicious.

Indeed, there is syrup in the crop in cicada's belly, which is the sweet juice that cicada draws from tender bark with its own small drill.

Is it because of this kind of candied fruit that cicada's belly becomes the first choice for hunters? It's quite possible.

In order to diversify the recipes, I actually specially feed them some sweet fruits, such as pear slices, grapes, melon slices and so on.

they all like to eat these fruits.

The green grasshopper is like an Englishman: it likes steak with jam very much.

Maybe that's why when it catches cicada, it opens its belly: it's full of delicious meat wrapped in jam.

You can't eat this delicious sweet cicada anywhere.

In the north, green grasshoppers are everywhere, so it is impossible for them to find this delicious food that they are keen on here.

they probably have other food.

in order to find out this problem, I fed them the fine-haired gill beetle, which is a summer gill beetle, the same as the spring gill beetle.

As soon as this kind of coleoptera insect was thrown into the cage, the green grasshoppers jumped on it without hesitation, leaving only its coleoptera, head and claws.

I threw in the beautiful and fleshy pine gill beetle again, and the result was the same. The next day, I found it was cut open by those devils.

these examples are enough to illustrate the problem.

This proves that grasshoppers are addicted to insects, especially those insects that are not protected by hard armor. This also proves that they especially like meat, but like mantis, they only eat their own prey.

The executioner of this cicada also knows that meat is too high in calories and needs to be adjusted with vegetarian food.

After eating meat and drinking blood, you need some fruit or something. Sometimes, there is really no fruit, so it is ok to eat some grass.

however, cannibalism still exists.

In fact, I have never seen the wild behavior of the migratory locust in my cage like mantis, who often cuts on his rival and devours his lover.

However, if a weak migratory locust falls in the cage, the survivors will pounce on it without hesitation like ordinary prey.

they didn't feed on their dead companions because of lack of food.

In any case, all insects with swords have a tendency to feed on disabled companions to varying degrees.

Besides this, the migratory locusts in my cage are living in peace.

They have never fought fiercely with each other. At best, they just fought for food a little.

as soon as I threw a pear into the cage, a migratory locust immediately occupied it.

for fear that others will fight for it, it kicks and kicks to prevent others from coming to grab its delicious food.

selfishness is everywhere.

when he was full, he gave up his seat to others, who immediately took over the pear slices.

The diners in the cage just fly up one by one.

After eating and drinking enough, everyone scratches the soles of their feet with the tips of their jaws, wipes their foreheads and eyes with their paws dipped in spit, and then grabs the gauze with their paws or lies on the sand, meditating and leisurely digesting food.

I sleep a lot during the day, especially when the weather is hot.

when the sun sets and the night falls, these guys will come up with energy.

around 9 o'clock, it's the most hilarious.

suddenly rushed to the dome, and then rushed down excitedly, and then rushed up.

People are clamoring to come and go, running and jumping on the roundabout, taking two bites when they meet something delicious, and they don't stop.

The male green grasshopper stayed by and teased the passing females with its tentacles.

Future mothers are walking solemnly, their swords half-lifted.

For those impatient and fanatical males, the important thing now is mating.

experienced people know what they want at a glance.

this is also the main content of my observation.

My wish was fulfilled, but not completely, because the following good things were delayed too late for me to see the last scene.

that last scene will be delayed until late at night or early in the morning.

what I saw was limited to the endless prologue.

lovestruck couples face to face, touching and testing each other with their soft tentacles almost head to head.

They are like two opponents who hit each other with foil to show their friendship.

The male chirps a few times from time to time, pulls it with the bow a few times, and then becomes silent, perhaps because he is too excited to continue pulling.

it's p>11 o'clock, and courtship is still not over.

I was so sleepy that I left the couple with great regret.

The next morning, there was a strange thing hanging under the root of the female ovipositor, which was a pocket filled with sperm, just like a milky light bulb, the size of which was like a balance weight, vaguely divided into a few oblong vesicles.

when the female grasshopper walked, the little light bulb rubbed the ground and stuck some sand.

Then, it takes this pregnant light bulb as a feast, slowly sucks up the contents, bites the dry thin skin, chews it repeatedly for a long time, and finally swallows it all.

in less than half a day, the milky white vegetation disappeared, and even the slag powder was eaten up by it happily.

This unimaginable feast seems to have been passed down from another planet, because it is quite different from the feast habits on earth.

The grasshoppers are really a strange world. They are one of the oldest land animals, and like centipedes and cephalopods, they are a representative of ancient habits.