Page:Insects - Their Ways and Means of Living.djvu/84

 while performing, and the breathing motions of the abdomen are very deep and rapid. The robust conehead is an inhabitant of dry, sandy places along the Atlantic coast from Massachusetts to Virginia and, according to Blatchley, of similar places near the shores of Lake Michigan in Indiana. The writer made its acquaintance in Connecticut on the sandy flats of the Quinnipiac Valley, north of New Haven, where its shrill song may be heard on summer nights from long distances.

29. The common meadow grasshopper, Orchelimum vulgare, a member of the katydid family

These are trim, slim little grasshopperlike insects, active by day, that live in moist meadows where the vegetation is always fresh and juicy. They constitute the subfamily Conocephalinae of the katydid family, having conical heads like the last group, but being mostly of smaller size. There are numerous species of the meadow grasshoppers, but most of them in the eastern part of the United States belong to two genera known as Orchelimum and Conocephalus. The most abundant and most widely distributed member of the first is the common meadow grasshopper, Orchelimum vulgare. A male is shown in Figure 29. He is a little over an inch in length, with head rather large for his size and with big eyes of a bright orange color. The ground color of his body is greenish, but the top of the head and the thoracic shield is occupied by a long triangular dark-brown patch, while the stridulating area of