New Grasshopper Species Named After Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff Walker
The Texas Hill Country outside of Austin is filled with the authentic sounds of Texas country music. It also happens to be filled with a good handful of rare grasshopper species that researchers from Mississippi State University have been trying to track down and catalog, including in and around the legendary town of Luckenbach TX made famous by appearances by Jerry Jeff Walker, Willie Nelson, and others.
All the more reason that when researchers were running around Central Texas looking for undiscovered bugs and listening to the music of the region, they were inspired to name some of the new species they found after the local heroes. This is what Dr. JoVonn Hill of Mississippi State and the Mississippi Entomological Museum has done with a couple of new Grasshopper species.
In a recent study published in the science journal Zookeys, seven new grasshopper species were identified. This included Melanoplus nelsoni and Melanoplus walkeri, named after Willie Nelson and Jerry Jeff Walker respectively. “The names were to honor the good memories we had listening to their music, and to help bring attention to the biodiversity and conservation of the hill country,” said Dr. Hill.
Two of the species were also named for the Comanche and Tonkawa Indians who are part of the local indigenous nations. “I think it’s important to recognize that connection culturally and spiritually.”
The difference between the newly-discovered grasshopper species and previous ones is the males don’t rub their legs together or flap their wings to make sounds to attract their mates. There is actually a delicate lock-and-key component to their reproductive organs that deem whether they can reproduce with females or not.
Waylon Jennings might be most identified with Luckenbach TX after he recorded the song “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)” and had a #1 hit with it in 1977. But at the time, Waylon had never been there, neither had songwriters Chips Moman and Bobby Emmons. It was Jerry Jeff Walker who really put the tiny little town on the map when he recorded his legendary album Viva Terlingua! there in 1973. Willie Nelson also made occasional appearances in Luckenbach, located about 70 miles from Austin.
A new statue featuring Jerry Jeff Walker and Luckenback mayor/imagineer Hondo Crouch was unveiled in October of 2022 on the Luckenbach TX grounds.
August 2, 2023 @ 8:32 am
I honestly can’t think of a better way of spending a spring/ summer than riding around in the Texas Hill Country listening to Willie and JJW tracking down and cataloging crickets. Sign me up next time!
“There is actually a delicate lock-and-key component to their reproductive organs that deem whether they can reproduce with females or not.” – I’ve been a SCM regular for 13 or 14 years and that is the strangest line ever read.
August 2, 2023 @ 3:18 pm
hoptowntiger – great comment!
August 2, 2023 @ 8:55 am
Trigger, you just astound me with this stuff!
Never thought I’d see an article about grasshoppers here.
I think next we should have one named for David Carradine who was called “Grasshopper” in the 70’s tv series “Kung Fu”!
August 2, 2023 @ 8:34 pm
Kung Fu is my therapist.
Good to see some love for a show that has helped me get through some really hard times.
There’s definitely a few episodes of that show that are as good as any movie I’ve ever seen. I think a show like that is good for anybody to watch, there is so much more than just kung fu movie classic wild West action. There’s a lot of really good philosophy and wisdom in there.
My father turned me onto that show. Just like Beverly hillbillies, Green acres, hee haw
Amazingly Wise man, my father was.
He had this incredible ability of nudging me in directions to set me on the right path. Sometimes a simple as telling me I should check out this cool show that he watched when he was my age, and from there I would go on to get into all kinds of westerns, movies and shows and music, and I came to a lot of conclusions about life, and I thought I discovered every single one of them, but really, it was my father setting me on the path
I grew up to be the kind of person My father would be proud of, and I didn’t even realize I was doing it because he was so subtle about putting me in all the right directions.
I don’t know if you remember an episode of kung fu, in which David comes across a lady who wants revenge on a soldier, and then the soldiers want revenge for the man she killed it, and then her father wants revenge on them, and then it comes out that he was a confederate and they want revenge for all the people the Confederates killed, and everyone keeps asking who has a right to revenge if they don’t? And the last line of the episode is that no one has a right to
I think that episode should be required viewing in all schools.
August 3, 2023 @ 3:44 am
Was my father ‘s favourite show as well here in Italy. Crazy.
August 2, 2023 @ 9:02 am
Thats a feel good piece.
Interesting about Waylon never being there.. Who would’ve thunk that?
August 2, 2023 @ 10:27 am
In other news, the same researchers have decided to name a newly-discovered stinkbug species after Jason Isbell.
August 3, 2023 @ 10:36 am
cicada stinkbug hybrid
August 2, 2023 @ 10:35 am
What’s next? Haggardpillars? Praying Mandrellises? Jimmiedean crickets? That’s all I got.
August 2, 2023 @ 11:50 am
Uh, ok.
August 2, 2023 @ 12:56 pm
Awesome. If anybody deserves to namesake a hill country grasshopper, Jerry Jeff does.
August 2, 2023 @ 12:58 pm
Things are really hopping around here. I’m jumping for joy at the leap forward in this recognition.
/I’ll see myself out…
August 2, 2023 @ 1:30 pm
well it has the word “grass” in it, so…
August 2, 2023 @ 4:44 pm
So rad!!! And the fact that someone named something after Willie is kind of cool, but after Jerry Jeff is triple rad in comparison because there is no social force that says that Jerry Jeff is cool. He is so cool on every level and more folks should know that.
August 3, 2023 @ 4:06 am
Great article! One of my favorite class in college at Texas Tech was entomology, running around the parks netting bugs, mounting them on foam boards and identifying. Was very enlightening, and now Jerry Jeff is immortalized as a Lepidoptra is fantastic!
August 3, 2023 @ 9:57 am
Glad you had the right key to mount them with. Were you identifying as an insect?
rotflmao
August 3, 2023 @ 12:29 pm
There’s a coffee shop (you know the one) in Amsterdam called The Grasshopper. Maybe they should change its name to The Willie Nelson.