HOPPING BACK

Citizen science is reversing the fortunes of the UK’s largest grasshopper

- JO CAIRD

You don’t get a lot of wildlife on the London Underground: rats and mice scurrying along the tracks; dogs sitting obediently at their owners’ feet; pigeons, perhaps, on the open air stretches of the network. That’s about it.

Yet on 18th July last year, Amy Stocking, a librarian from Claygate, Surrey, found herself in a busy tube carriage with some rather more unusual animals. In her bag that day were about 20 large marsh grasshoppers, insects that she had hatched and spent weeks rearing as a volunteer keeper with Citizen Zoo, a social enterprise dedicated to conservation and rewilding.

In just five weeks, the hoppers had gone from tiny nymphs (“when they first hatch they’re like little specks”) to fully grown adults, ready to be released into a restored area of their former habitat from which the species had been absent for over 50 years.

“When they’re adults, they stridulate,” says Stocking, referring to the characteristic mating sound that grasshoppers make by hitting a back leg against a forewing. “There I was on the tube with all these hoppers, chirping away.”

LARGE MARSH GRASSHOPPERS, AS their name suggests, are the largest of the UK's 11 native species. The females measure up to about 4cm long and weigh three times the mass of their biggest cousins. They are also, sadly, among our rarest - victims of habitat degradation resulting from changing land use in East Anglia, including the Fens, a large area of historically marshy, low-lying land stretching across Cambridgeshire and Norfolk.

“The Fens were almost certainly heaving with large marsh grasshoppers 300 years ago,” says Stuart Green, lead entomologist for Citizen Zoo and a grasshopper specialist.