PRETTY IN PINK
Bright bug hops into A’burg yard
Kermit the Frog famously complained it wasn’t easy being green. He should try being pink.
Brian Dickie was doing some yard work at his Amherstburg home when his wife suddenly yelled at him to “Get over here!”
He ran to her side and couldn’t believe what he saw in the backyard.
“There was this very, very pink insect hopping around,” he said.
The family gently captured the bug for a closer look.
“The first thing I thought was somebody must have been painting their patio furniture or something and it hopped through,” he said.
A quick call to the Ojibway Nature Centre helped colour in some of the facts.
The tiny intruder turned out to be an oblong-winged katydid.
Staff at the centre told Dickie that pink insects are very rare, but they are out there.
“They don’t usually make it do adulthood because they get picked off by predators so easily, but this one is big,” he explained.
Gard Otis, a professor at the University of Guelph’s school of environmental sciences, has studied “bizarrely coloured” bugs in the tropics, but said it’s rare to see an insect with such a striking hue in North America.
After being sent a picture of the insect, Otis researched more on the pink-lemonade shaded katydid, which goes by the Latin name Amblycorypha oblongifolia.
“I started looking I was like, ‘Holy crap, look at those pink katydids, those are astounding,’ ” he said. “They are incredibly, brilliantly pink.”
According to Otis, recent scientific studies have revealed that pink is actually among the dominant colour pigments for katydids.
“Dominant just refers to how it’s expressed genetically,” he explained. “What determines how common or rare something is, is how advantageous or disadvantageous it is to the animal.
“Being bright pink, you would think, in our landscape with a green background, should be the kiss of death for anything,” he added.
It turns out katydids can come in a rainbow of shades, including green, orange, tan, brown, yellow and, of course, pink.
“If someone finds a pink katydid they should enjoy it for its amazing beauty,” said Otis.
Dickie said his family has been keeping the unusual insect in a small aquarium along with leaves and sticks — they’re consulting experts to see how they can best ensure the bug keeps defying the odds.
“I don’t want it to have only one more hour of life after we let it go,” he said. “The fact it’s made it this far is impressive.”