katydids

So in Texas we have a bunch of Katydids, which are a close relative to the grasshopper. They make incredibly loud noises for insects, mostly at night, however the noise I can deal with. Katydids and grasshoppers are, in my opinion, the ugliest insects I see here in Dallas. I'm sure there is uglier, but for some reason I've harbored this personal vendetta against grasshoppers and katydids since I was little. I just think they're so gangly and disgusting, ugly little heads and spiky stick-life legs, yuck. Probably one of the few insects I make a point of going out of my way to kill.

Today I had the immense pleasure of killing 42 katydids while mowing my parents' lawn. I've never seen so many in such concentration. I guess they were just kind of hanging out in the leaves covering my parents' lawn and when I turned on the mower the vibrations must've stirred'em up because I could almost always see one or two jumping around ahead of me trying to get out of the way of the mower. A few of them weren't mobile enough to get out of the path of the mower, and even a few that did I hunted down to run over. Most of them, however, I left the mower and had to go stomp on. Call it cruel, call it hatred, it's probably a little of both but I don't really care. I don't even know why I hate them so much, there definitely are uglier insect. I think it's just that every time I've gone to pick one up, especially as a kid when I didn't know better, they would maneuver their disgusting legs around to latch onto you and then proceed to 'spit' or bite you with this ultra-disgusting mouths. Anyways, it was fun for me to have the opportunity to destroy so many of these hated insects, including running 20ft chasing after one flying away and doing a hop, skip, jump right onto his face, hah.