Liladownsia Fraile: New Grasshopper Species Named After Mexican Singer
Thursday, May 8, 2014 - 11:10
in Biology & Nature
There are about 9,700 known species of grasshoppers in the world. Now there is one more, and it has beeen named Grammy-award winning singer and Mexican activist Ana Lila Downs Sanchez. Locals called the creature the friar grasshopper because its head looks a bit like what a monk with his hood pulled back might look like and so the scientific name of the new grasshopper is Liladownsia fraile. In Spanish, "friale" means friar. The new species was discovered on the side of a mountain road near Oaxaca, Mexico. The men were doing fieldwork for another grasshopper study in a pine-oak forest of the Sierra Madre del Sur Mountain Range in Oaxaca, Mexico, when they came across their discovery in 2011. read more