Grasshoppers play football with their poo
STUCK for a subject to write a scientific paper on? Why not do something on how far grasshoppers can kick their poo?
This is what Yosuke Tanaka and Eiiti Kasuya did. They published their study “Flying distance of frass kicked by the grasshopper Atractomorpha lata and factors affecting the flying distance” in the journal Entomological Science (vol 14, p 133). Frass, for anyone unfamiliar with the niceties of grasshopper life, is the powdery waste material passed by plant-eating insects.
Here is a flavour, if you’ll pardon the choice of word, of this treatise…
