This is an older photo that I had genuinely forgotten I had taken. It was taken back last fall when I found this big Atlantic grasshopper (Paroxya atlantica) playing hide and seek with me around the stem of a blackjack plant. It seemed to believe that as long as it stayed on the opposite side of the plant stem, that I couldn’t see it. That presented the opportunity to get some closeup shots as long as I stayed on the opposite side. I thought this one was pretty interesting since it gave a nice view of the mouth parts. As you can probably easily recognize, grasshoppers don’t have a mouth that just opens and closes like ours. Instead, they have two maxillae, which look like a pair of little legs, and are used to get the food into the mouth. They also have two shorter leg-like appendages, called labium, which are essentially sensory palps. There are also a pair of mandibles that are located behind the maxillae and the labium. Like our mandibles, they help to grind the food, but instead of moving up and down, they move side to side. There are some other parts, and each part has multiple sub parts, but that’s the basic gist of it. Pretty cool, huh?