Eerie grasshoppers and dicey days

This is how we found the grasshoppers yesterday morning.

Are they trying to communicate?

All lined up in a row, with the boss hopper on top?  Or an almost symmetrical arrangement: three on the left, three on the right, and three in a triangle in the centre - the far right one sulking at the side instead of getting between the two brown ones on that side because it wanted to be in the triangle.

It's amazing how well they blend in with the grass.  I'll have to see if I can get a good enough photo with the not-brilliant-quality phone camera that I use and put up a game of spot the grasshopper.

We had quite a scare with Spinelar the other day too.

Spinelar says, 'nothing to see here.'

Her enclosure catches the morning sun, which is usually nice, but we've had some extremely hot weather. On very hot days that whole corner heats up enormously, so we take her (vase, branches and all) out of the enclosure and sit her somewhere cooler.  It's not like she ever moves any further than the next leaf to munch on, so we've left her sitting on the coffee table for a couple of days before.  Just have to clean up the poop-pellets and eggs.

When we first got spiny leaf insects, we figured that they wouldn't mind heat too much because they're from Queensland. Last year during a heatwave, Leafy and Spinelar did OK, but all of the babies alive at that time died. Generally, I try not to use home air conditioners - I'd rather go to the beach, the pool, the shopping centre, the library. This year I've been forced to use it to save the bug.

One hot day a couple of weeks ago, Spinelar on the coffee table wasn't looking too flash. She was flopping over sideways and looking limp. I turned the air conditioner on for the first time since we moved in here. Having seen stories of reviving sick stick insects with sugar water, we tried her with some of that and eventually she started looking better and then went back to her usual self.

Although she doesn't move around a lot, she has her way of doing things that we've become accustomed to. Her abdomen pulses almost as if she's breathing (more probably the constant squeezing eggs out, I'm guessing), when we spray water around she'll start swaying as if she's been caught in a breeze and when she's disturbed she'll often grab the nearest leaf and start munching as if her life depended on it.

Last Sunday, we had another hot one.  I turned the air conditioner on.  It went 'whiirrrr... pshhhhh' and silence. Something in the fuse box, something that couldn't be fixed without an electrician, had burnt out. We removed her to the coffee table.  We thought it might not be so bad because there was a cool change setting in early, so we opened the doors and windows and let in the howling, but ever so slightly cooler than inside, wind.

She didn't like it. She went floppy again. Very floppy. At one stage I thought she was gone, but just the slightest movement of a leg told me that the end had not yet come. I offered her sugar water. She ignored it. We went to bed that night fully expecting that she wouldn't make it. Surprisingly, in the morning she was still with us. She accepted a little sugar water. Suddenly, she really seemed to like the sugar water, her mouth parts were flicking all over the cotton-tip. I could have fed her more but was scared of giving her whatever is the equivalent of insect diabetes.

She's eating leaves again and looking stronger, but I think this last incident has affected her. She hardly moves at all now when we spray, her abdomen seems still.  She's moved herself around and seemed ok a couple of times, but something about her has changed.  Not to mention she's getting on in age. We've had her for fourteen or fifteen months, she was probably at least a couple of months old when we got her, so she's getting close to the average lifespan.  We'll have to see how she fares, but I worry the heat may have hastened that somewhat.