Grasshopper
Grasshoppers eat large quantities of foliage both as adults and during their development, and can be serious pests of arid land and prairies. Pasture, grain, forage, vegetable and other crops can be affected. Grasshoppers often bask in the sun, and thrive in warm sunny conditions, so drought stimulates an increase in grasshopper populations. A single season of drought is not normally sufficient to stimulate a major population increase, but several successive dry seasons can do so, especially if the intervening winters are mild so that large numbers of nymphs survive. Although sunny weather stimulates growth, there needs to be an adequate food supply for the increasing grasshopper population. This means that although precipitation is needed to stimulate plant growth, prolonged periods of cloudy weather will slow nymphal development.
Grasshopper
Grasshoppers belong to the suborder Caelifera. Although, "grasshopper" is sometimes used as a common name for the suborder in general, some sources restrict it to the more "advanced" groups. They may be placed in the infraorder Acrididea and have been referred-to as "short-horned grasshoppers" in older texts to distinguish them from the also-obsolete term "long-horned grasshoppers" (now bush-crickets or katydids) with their much longer antennae. The phylogeny of the Caelifera, based on mitochondrial ribosomal RNA of thirty-two taxa in six out of seven superfamilies, is shown as a cladogram. The Ensifera (crickets, "etc.") Caelifera and all the superfamilies of grasshoppers except Pamphagoidea appear to be monophyletic.