A green grasshopper with blue and yellow markings
This grasshopper was perched on a green stem in Lombok, surrounded by withering leaves and fresh green shoots. Its body was mostly green, marked with blue and yellow patches, and its long, reddish antennae curved forward like two delicate feelers. It stayed perfectly still as I approached, trusting its colour to hide it against the vegetation.
This is Caryanda spuria, a member of the family Acrididae in the order Orthoptera, the true grasshoppers. The genus Caryanda is a group of slender, medium-sized grasshoppers found across Asia, often associated with grasses and low herbs in forest clearings and hillsides. The species name spuria means false or spurious in Latin, a name that usually hints at a confusing similarity to another species, as if the original describers were not quite sure what they were looking at.
Grasshoppers like this one are the quiet engine of grassland ecosystems, converting plant material into food for birds, lizards and spiders. Their camouflage is remarkable: a green individual sitting on a green stem is nearly invisible until it moves, and this one only gave itself away when it shifted a leg. The long antennae of this species make it look almost delicate, but behind them sits a set of powerful jumping legs and a pair of jaws that can cut through tough leaves with ease.
The name spuria has always amused me, because it sounds like the scientist who named it was having a difficult day. There is nothing false about this grasshopper. It was very real, very green, and very good at hiding in plain sight.
Great post! I was curious about the name “spuria” meaning “false” — do you know which other species Caryanda spuria was originally confused with when it was first described, and how can the two be told apart in the field?
Good question, and the short answer is that there was never one specific species it was mixed up with. Stål described it in 1861, from insects collected on the Swedish frigate Eugenie round-the-world voyage, and filed it with the rice grasshoppers as Acridium (Oxya) spurium. So the doubt was at the genus level: he parked it inside Oxya but called it spurium, the false one, as if he was not convinced it was a genuine member of the group. He kept that doubt, because in 1878 he pulled it out and made it the type species of a brand new genus, Caryanda, where it sits today. In a way the name turned out prophetic: it really was a false Oxya, not a lookalike of one particular species.
In the field, the confusion you would actually run into today is still Oxya. The rice grasshoppers are chunkier and stick to wet paddies and rank wet grass, while Caryanda are slimmer, with proportionally longer antennae, on grasses and low herbs in drier clearings and hillsides; those long reddish antennae in the photos are a good Caryanda-style cue. Beyond that, species-level ID is genuinely hard: as far as I can tell this species has no published field characters, it is known from very few specimens, and definitive IDs usually come down to males and genitalia. Little green grasshoppers like this are exactly the reason nineteenth-century names such as spuria exist.