Rare pink grasshopper photographed

Translated from NOS TV in the Netherlands:

Rare pink grasshopper spotted in Hoofddorp

Today, 15:21

It’s unlikely that you will ever really see one, but it happened to Suzanne Wieringh in Hoofddorp: she spotted a pink grasshopper. The rare animal was in her garden.

Suzanne wanted to pick up her daughter’s shoe when she saw something that was pinkish. “At first I thought it was a rose petal, but then it started to jump,” she says to the regional broadcasting organisation of North Holland.

A professor of entomology at Wageningen University explains that the phenomenon is known among biologists as erythrism. This is a deviation which is similar to albinism, only erythrism causes a reddish color instead of white.

It is difficult to determine how many pink grasshoppers are born. These grasshoppers quickly fall prey to predators because of their poor camouflage.

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