Little boy finds early spring surprise in his Texas garden!
A 3-year-old noticed a pink grasshopper in his family’s garden while exploring in his backyard in southwest Texas this past Sunday.
His mother, Angela Barger, took some photos and did some investigating to see exactly what he found.
“Brooks loves bugs, so he reacted the same way he would react to finding a rolly-polly,” Barger told USA Today.
“He spent a lot of time talking sweetly to the grasshopper about how cute it was. We didn’t think anything of it until I did a quick internet search and realized how rare it was.”
Even when they are found, they usually don’t live until adulthood. Their pink skin against all the lush green, is often a bullseye on their back for bigger, hungry critters.
So why are they pink?
“It is called erythrism an unusual and little-understood genetic mutation caused by a recessive gene similar to that which affects albino animals,” Victoria Hillman with National Geographic says.
“This mutation results in one of two things happening or even a combination of the two; a reduce or even absence of the normal pigment and/or the excessive production of other pigments, in this case red which results in pink morphs.”
While seen and documented in the United Kingdom, the rarity in which they’re found in the United States has led to little research on the insects.