The New Clothes!

Two things prompted me to start that pondering again..a grasshopper and a crab!  Sometimes, I feel like all I do is try to figure out just how things operate in nature.  Today's conundrum?  How in the world do critters change their clothes?  Now before you get the wrong idea, I am referring to the molting process of a lot of animals and insects.  Take, for instance, the grasshopper.  Now you know that with their exoskeletons it would to be a pain to grow if they had no way of expanding their body.  You can only cram so much body inside that crate-like body.  So what do they do when they gain a bit too much weight and their clothes fit too tight?  The grasshopper merely trades it in for a new look!  It casts off the old exoskeleton like last season's outfit!  The grasshopper's body gets all soft and squishy, the old "clothes" split at the seams and out emerges a larger bug in a beautiful new outfit!  The process takes quite a while but is oh, so worth it when it is finished!  The grasshopper can "breathe" again much like us when we finally admit we need a size larger jeans. Whew!

While on the pier today, Son pointed out a Eastern Lubber Grasshopper doing just that.  We watched for a while as the soft, bright red grasshopper squeezed its way out of its old, black shell of a body.  The grasshopper at this point was highly vulnerable to any predators.  When shedding like this, the insect is soft and cannot move well. The one plus that the Eastern Lubber Grasshopper has over other grasshoppers is the fact that they are slightly toxic so most would be predators simply look elsewhere for a meal. Their coloring lets the world know that they are poisonous.  That red, black and (later in the mature) yellow almost always signals that the critter is one not to be eaten!  The bright redness of this critter will turn black as the new exoskeleton hardens.  Once it is fully mature the grasshopper will be dark with yellow and red markings.

After photographing the grasshopper shedding, Michael and I checked the soft-shell boxes for any crabs that might have gone through the same molting process.  These we will eat!  Sure enough, two crabs were extremely soft and had already discarded their old shells.  What amazes me about the crab's shedding is that I can never figure out just how they get out of their old shell!!!  For the longest time, I thought that I just had a dead crab in the traps along with the many live ones.  Now since we have separate boxes for the future soft-shells, it is easy to see that what I assumed was a dead crab is the cast off shell of a healthy soft-shelled crab.  The two in the picture are one and the same.  The crab on the right is an empty castoff while the crab on the left is soft.  It had just emerged from its old shell and could still not move.  At this point, there is no danger in holding the crab..it cannot hurt you with those normally sharp claws!  I examined the castoff molt but still could not figure out how in the world that crab managed to slither out of it!  Hmmm..Houdini had nothing on these crabs!  They are the true escape artists!

So the next time you feel the need for a shopping trip to buy a new outfit, think of the critters that can get theirs without heading to the mall!  They just peel off the old and can step out in a brand new outfit!  Critters amaze and amuse me to no end!!