Bug in a bubble wrap

Dawn broke gently over Navilu Kaadu. Sunbirds, Indian robins, bee-eaters and flowerpeckers flitted about like enchanting fairies over the tall grass behind a curtain of slowly melting haze, casting an ethereal spell over the land. The sun, a softly glowing creamy orb, drifted up stealthily beyond our neighbour’s cotton field.

I ambled towards our front gate to unlock it for the day, watchfully, lest I startled creatures in repose. I looked for shifting grass, stirring shadows in the canopies and movement on land. Instead, something still caught my eye — glistening blobs of white foam on grass blades. Some got on my clothes as I brushed past the grass.

Back at the cottage, I spotted a minuscule pale green bug about 2 to 3 mm, crawling on my jeans — a spittlebug, the nymph of a froghopper, named after the foamy mass it dwells in. I stepped out and placed it back on a blade of grass, hoping it could bubble-wrap itself again.

Froghoppers go through three life stages — egg, nymph and adult. These little insects belong to the family Cercopidae under the order Hemiptera. Hemipteran insects are equipped with rigid piercing and sucking mouth parts designed to help them suck on plant juices. They are an integral part of natural ecosystems everywhere and are food for plenty of bird species.

In a life spanning three months, froghoppers mate several times. The female lays between 100 and 200 eggs in the crevices of plants, during winter. Tiny spittlebugs emerge in spring and feed on plant sap. These bugs suck harder than any known creature. Unlike most sap-feeding insects that feed on nutritious liquid from the phloem, froghoppers prefer the watery, nutrient-deficient xylem sap flowing up from plant roots. They hence need to drink lots of it. The xylem and phloem are vascular tissues that ferry food and water in plants.

Froghoppers summon their suction chops to draw out xylem sap that exists under negative pressures, in vacuum-like conditions, unlike the easy-flowing sap within the phloem. Scientists from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver have found that froghoppers have suction or cibarial pumps in their heads that generate suction pressures of 1.6 megapascals. This equals 80 times the suction power of an elephant and is the human equivalent of sucking out juice from a 100-metre-long straw.

Just the thought leaves me drained and winded!

Scientists have also discovered that spittlebug nymphs excrete 150 to 280 times liquid their own body weight every day. For a human weighing about 68 kg, that would be over 12,000 litres a day!

These baby froghoppers draw air into the ventral cavity of their abdomen, whipping it into the fluid contained in their Malpighian tubules (the insect equivalent of kidneys) and extrude froth called ‘cuckoo spit’ from their rear ends, that engulfs the nymph.

Why cuckoo spit? A plausible explanation could be that these balls of foam with their occupants, appear during spring and summer, when the sweet song of the cuckoo fills the air.

The acrid-tasting foam forms a shield, keeping the spittlebugs hydrated and safe from hungry ants and opportunistic wasps. The spittlebugs develop inside their foamy abodes for a couple of weeks and moult into mature froghoppers, flying off to embark on adult lives.

Mature froghoppers are a quarter of an inch long, and have anatomies that taper at the front, akin to wee frogs — and they leap, hence the name. Their leaping prowess is legendary, and like the Marvel superhero Bruce Banner aka The Incredible Hulk, who leaps great distances over lofty skyscrapers, a froghopper can leap 100 times the length of its body. The initial leap of a mature froghopper subjects it to a G-force of a whopping 400 Gs! This makes the G-force of 5 Gs, which propels an astronaut into space orbit, and 10 Gs acting on a pilot inside a roaring fighter jet — both in protective pressure suits — piddly.

Isn’t it rather lame that we sapiens bestow upon ourselves the unwarranted distinction of ‘highest life form’? More so, when we live among phenomenal creatures with superpowers we can only fantasise about, by way of imagined comic book superheroes.

Rooting For Nature is a monthly column on an off-kilter urban family’s trysts with nature on a natural farm.

The author chipped away at a software marketing career before shifting gears to independent consulting and natural farming. She posts as @ramyacoushik on Instagram. Reach her at [e-mail]