It's Leafhopper Season

Fall is the time when many kinds of true bugs, in the order Hemiptera, reach peak abundance, before going into hiding for the winter. This includes stink bugs, leaf-footed bugs, plant bugs, aphids, whiteflies, psyllids, and leafhoppers. If you haven’t looked closely at leafhoppers, there is a great deal you are missing.

A leafhopper in the genus Erythroneura on a redbud leaf.

Leafhoppers use piercing-sucking mouthparts to feed on plant sap. It isn’t a nutritious diet, so they imbibe great quantities, and excrete a copious amount of sugary, sticky, liquid waste. Some leafhoppers are known as sharpshooters, in part because they eject their waste like a squirt gun fires water. This action keeps their waste from gumming up their own bodies, and also works to not draw the attention of potential predators and parasitoids that could track them by their excrement.

Red-banded Leafhopper at our porch light at night.

Versute Sharpshooter at our front porch light at night.

How to Identify a Leafhopper

There are at least 3,000 members of the family Cicadellidae found north of Mexico, and over 22,000 globally. More are likely to be separated from existing species by molecular DNA analysis. Leafhoppers range in size from two to thirty millimeters in length. Most of the diversity occurs in the range under five millimeters.

A pair of Erythroneura bistrata under a redbud leaf.

These are streamlined insects, usually with a narrow body form. The hind legs are long, built for jumping, and there are two rows of many spines on those hind legs. Spittlebugs and planthoppers do not have those rows of spines. The antennae are relatively sort, consisting of hair-like filaments. In most views, without magnification, they appear to have no antennae at all.

Tylozygus bifidus attracted to a blacklight at night in our back yard.

Colorful!

Break out your magnifiers, you are gonna wanna see this. Leafhoppers can be shockingly beautiful, with striking patterns of ivory and red, or blue and red, in stripes or bands, or spotted. At this time of year, species that are normally green may take on the hues of autumn foliage, the better to camouflage themselves. There is almost no end to the “fashion spectrum” for leafhoppers.

Gyponana octolineata that was attracted to a mercury vapor light at night.

You cannot rely on color patterns alone to differentiate species. Newly-minted adults will be paler, even lacking markings initially until pigments manifest and the exoskeleton hardens after that final molt. There may be some sexual dimorphism expressed as differences in color between males and females. There is no doubt individual variation, too.

Erythroneura fraxa, a redbud specialist, on its host plant.

How to Find Leafhoppers

Right now, where we are in northeast Kansas, you cannot avoid leafhoppers. They are in the air, in your lawn, on foliage (especially the underside of leaves), and landing briefly on buildings, fences, or you. Turn on your porch light at night, and you will see a diversity of them flying in.

Empoasca sp. (maybe Potato Leafhopper), green, and genus Hymetta, white, at our front porch light at night.

Try taking photos with a camera or phone that has good macro capabilities. The images show here were taken by me with a Canon PowerShot SX70 camera, one of the bridge cameras or “superzooms” that allow the casual photographer to take a variety of images without changing lenses. Approach the insect slowly. Many will leap, or take flight, but eventually you will have a cooperative specimen.

Illinois Grape Leafhopper on redbud leaf.

Are They Pests?

Whether leafhoppers are pests depends on who you ask, and maybe when you ask. Some leafhoppers, if they alight on you, will probe with their mouthparts, and it is surprisingly painful, albeit briefly, and in an annoying, not agonizing, way. In natural ecosystems, native leafhoppers are part of the food web. In agricultural systems, they can be problematic.

Japanese Maple Leafhopper at blacklight at night.

Some species are vectors of plant viruses that can wreak havoc on crops. Others transmit bacterial diseases. The mechanical and chemical aspects of their normal feeding of course results in some damage to the plant. On leaves, heavy feeding can result in white or yellow stippling where their mouthparts have entered, and chlorophyl has been extracted.

Gray Lawn Leafhopper is abundant most everywhere.

Females insert their eggs into living plant tissue, which also causes damage. Leafhoppers have a general life cycle that includes about five immature instars, an instar being the interval between molts. The young are called nymphs, and they gradually get larger over time. The final molt results in the adult insect. Adults of most species have wings and fly well.

A tiny Dikrella maculata at our front porch light at night.

How Your Observations Help Scientists

By sharing your photos on platforms like iNaturalist and Buggide.net, you can help scientists learn more about the distribution, host plants, seasonal presence, and other attributes of leafhoppers. You may add new county records, or state or provincial records, or even detect a recently-arrived leafhopper of foreign origin. In any event, enjoy the remarkable beauty of these tiny creatures.

Check out my observations on iNat, and my Flickr album for inspiration.

"That's all, folks!"Typical behavior, dodging to the opposite side of foliage.

Happy International Jumping Spider Day

I can hardly believe we are one third of the way through October already, but at least we can celebrate International Jumping Spider Day on October 10. This is the ninth anniversary of the "holiday," which was founded by Shaham Tamir, a macrophotographer, in 2017. It is also known as National Jumping Spider Appreciation Day.

A male White-jawed Jumping Spider, Hentzia mitrata, from April of this year, Wyandotte County Lake Park, Kansas.

The annual #Arachtober event is also in progress on social media, and the photosharing site Flickr, where it originated. I am privileged to know both of the Arachtober founders, Joseph Connors and Ashley Bradford. As the name implies, Arachtober honors not only spiders, but mites, scorpions, harvestmen, and all other arachnids.

An immature female Golden Jumping Spider, Paraphidippus aurantius, has taken down a soldier beetle in our Leavenworth, Kansas back yard, in June.

Jumping spiders have become wildly popular in both the pet trade, and in pop culture in recent years. It is an encouraging example of how attitudes towards spiders can be changed through creative and, well, relentless, approaches. It helps that the members of the spider family Salticidae are often fuzzy, with one pair of very large, forward-facing eyes that give them a much more endearing appearance than most other spiders. There are now jumping spider plush toys.

Studio portrait of a male Bold Jumper, Phidippus audax, from our back yard in Leavenworth, Kansas, in May of this year.

Salticids are also the subject of research in many disciplines, especially animal behavior. Some species, such as those in the tropical genus Portia, exhibit the ability to plot their attacks on prey to avoid detection by their intended victim. Courtship behavior in jumping spiders is also complex. Males and females are frequently sexually dimorphic, to the degree that the sexes can be mistaken for different species.

This tiny, adult male Attinella concolor, was the first of its kind I had ever seen. June of this year, Leavenworth, Kansas.

Jumping spiders are the most diverse family of spiders, with a collectively global distribution, save for Antarctica, and are among the easiest spiders to find. They hunt on foot, without the aid of a web, but deposit a silken dragline for safely returning from a missed jump.

You can probably find one hunting on the exterior of your house right now. Approach slowly, as they have keen eyesight and are exceptional at detecting motion. I have had many a jumping spider escape beneath the siding of our home because I moved a little too fast. The underside of leaves, on tree trunks, and on the ground are other places to search for them. Sometimes they stray indoors, too.

There are some jaw-dropping ant mimics among the jumping spiders, like this male Synemosyna formica that I found on the outside of a neighbor's house here in Leavenworth, Kansas in early May.

Since Heidi and I were on a road trip to and from Tucson, Arizona at the start of the month, I have decided to participate in Arachtober using images from my iPhone 14, much as I did for National Moth Week this year. Spiders are a challenging subject for even those who are most accomplished at phone photography, so my results may be....mixed.

Phone pic of a female Green Lynx Spider, with American Snout butterfly prey, and her egg sac at right. Madera Canyon, Arizona, last week.

Please leave a comment telling us how you celebrate Jumping Spider Day, and/or Arachtober. Did you have a phobia that you were able to overcome? Do you make art involving arachnids? Maybe you have a pet spider? While I do not accept unsolicited images here, you are welcome to include a link to images you have elsewhere. Enjoy the rest of the month!