Colorful New Grasshopper Species Discovered on Mountain Road Near Oaxaca, Mexico
Posted on May 13, 2014
A newly discovered grasshopper species has been named after Mexican-American singer-songwriter Ana Lila Downs Sanchez. The colorful grasshopper was discovered on the side of a mountain road near Oaxaca, Mexico by scientists from the University of Central Florida (UCF). The Lila Downs friar grasshopper (Liladownsia fraile) is about an inch long. It has blue, red, yellow, orange and black markings. It resides in the pine-oak forest of the Sierra Madre del Sur Mountain Range.
Derek Woller, one of the authors of the paper, says in a statement, "It was primarily Paolo's [Fontana] idea to name the grasshopper after the singer. He's a big fan of Lila Downs (her stage name). The grasshopper is so beautiful, so vibrant and colorful. When he told us all about her, her work, her colorful clothes, and that she was born in the region where we found the specimens, we thought, yeah, that's great, let's do it."
The researchers were surprised that a grasshopper this large and located on the side of a road had not been discovered before. The unique grasshopper species has been placed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's new Red List of threatened species. A research paper on the new grasshopper is published here in Zootaxa.