Katydid: The Insect That Turned Itself Into a Leaf

What a Katydid Actually Is

Katydids belong to the family Tettigoniidae, inside the order Orthoptera — the same order that holds grasshoppers, crickets, and locusts. There are more than 8,000 described species worldwide, on every continent except Antarctica, with roughly 250 of them living in North America. A huge share of the global diversity sits in tropical rainforest canopy, where the camouflage arms race has produced katydids that mimic dead leaves, lichen, moss, and even leaves with fungal spots and insect-chewed holes built right into the wing pattern.

The older name for the family is long-horned grasshoppers, and the "horns" are the antennae. That is the single most useful thing to know about them. A katydid's antennae are threadlike and usually longer than its entire body. A grasshopper's are short, thick, and stubby. Everything else about telling these insects apart is refinement.

Two other structural details are worth carrying into the field. Katydids hold their wings tented steeply over the body rather than flat along the back. And their ears are on their front legs — a pair of small oval slits on the shin of each foreleg, positioned there because a male's song is what a female navigates toward in total darkness.

Katydid vs. Grasshopper vs. Cricket

These three get lumped together constantly, and the confusion is fair — they are genuinely close relatives. But katydids and crickets sit together in one branch of Orthoptera (Ensifera), while grasshoppers sit in a separate branch (Caelifera). The split is ancient, and it shows up all over the body.

There is one more difference that changes how you should feel about finding one on your land. Grasshoppers are committed plant-eaters and, in numbers, genuinely destructive. Katydids are light feeders, and many species are opportunistic omnivores — a few tropical species are outright predators that hunt other insects. A katydid in your garden is nibbling. A grasshopper swarm in your field is a problem.

Identifying the One We Found

The insect in these photographs is a greater angle-wing katydid, Microcentrum rhombifolium. It's one of the largest katydids in North America — roughly two to two and a half inches — and it's common across most of the United States and into southern Canada.

On bare soil, where the camouflage stops working entirely

The habitat it walked out of — and the reason a leaf-shaped body works so well

Here's how we got to the species, in the order the features actually read in the field:

The Wing Shape

Look at the top edge of the folded wing. It rises to a distinct angular peak partway along, then tapers to a sharp point at the rear like a willow leaf. That angle is the entire reason for the name. A common true katydid has bulky, rounded, humpbacked wings with no point at all. An oblong-winged katydid has a blunt, rounded wingtip. This one comes to a spear point.

The Venation

The wing carries a heavy central vein running its full length with finer veins branching off at leaf-like angles. This isn't incidental patterning — it's structural mimicry of a broadleaf. In the twig photograph, where the insect sits among real leaves, it's nearly impossible to pick out until your eye locks onto the legs.

The Antennae and the Size

Long, threadlike, and extending well past the body — that alone rules out every grasshopper. And compare the body against the twig it's standing on. This is a big insect, noticeably larger than the bush katydids and meadow katydids that make up most of what turns up in Michigan grass.

Greater vs. Lesser Angle-Wing

There's a near-twin, the lesser angle-wing (Microcentrum retinerve), and the two get mixed up constantly online. Three characters separate them: size (the lesser runs roughly one and three-quarter to two inches against the greater's two to two and a half), the pronotum (the greater has a small tooth on the front center margin of the shield behind the head; the lesser's margin is smooth and straight), and the male's stridulatory field (green on a greater, brown and visibly contrasting on a lesser).

What Katydids Eat — And the Video

The textbook answer is leaves, flowers, tender stems, and fruit, and for the greater angle-wing that's mostly accurate. They feed up in trees and shrubs at night, taking small amounts from a lot of different plants rather than stripping any one. That's why they almost never register as a real pest. The one exception is young citrus orchards, where nibbling on developing fruit peel leaves scars that make it unsellable. Not a Michigan problem.

But "leaf eater" is an incomplete answer, and this video is a small piece of evidence for why.

What Katydids Sound Like

The name is onomatopoeia, and it belongs to a different species than the one in our photos. The common true katydid (Pterophylla camellifolia) produces a harsh two- and three-pulse rasp from high in the canopy that listeners have heard for two centuries as katy-did, katy-didn't. On a warm August night in a stand of oaks, hundreds call in overlapping waves that build into a genuine wall of sound.

The greater angle-wing sounds nothing like that. Its call is a dry tick — sometimes a rapid series of clicks, sometimes a single lisping note repeated every two to four seconds. It's easy to mistake for something mechanical, and easy to miss entirely if you're listening for the classic rasp.

In every case, only males sing, and they do it by scraping a ridged file on one forewing across a hardened scraper on the other. Females listen through the ears on their front shins and walk toward the male they choose. Temperature drives tempo — the colder the night, the slower the call — which is why the whole soundscape of a Michigan woodlot slows down and thins through September and stops dead at the first hard freeze.

The Six-Weeks-to-Frost Folklore

There's an old American saying that first frost arrives six weeks after you hear the first katydid. Like most weather folklore, it's a real observation wearing a false explanation. Katydids don't predict anything. They start calling when they finish maturing, and maturation timing tracks accumulated summer warmth — which is the same variable that shapes how fall cools down. Two effects sharing one cause. The correlation is loose but not accidental. In Michigan the interval usually runs longer than six weeks. Worth telling kids on a porch in August. Not worth planning your garden around.

Eggs and the Life Cycle

Katydid eggs are one of the easiest insect signs to find in winter, once you know what you're looking at. The greater angle-wing female lays flat, gray, oval eggs in a neat overlapping row along a twig — shingled, like roof tiles, running a straight line down the branch. She roughens the bark first, then glues each egg down individually, which is why they don't wash off in rain. Some related species insert eggs directly into the edge of a leaf, where they appear as small oval swellings along the margin. People find them on window screens, on clothesline wire, on garden shrub stems, and assume something has infested the house.

If that's what brought you here — you found a row of flat gray discs on a twig and want to know whether to spray — we wrote a separate guide on exactly that: Katydid Eggs: What Those Rows on Your Twigs Really Are, including how to tell them apart from scale insects.

The life cycle is simple and single-generation in our climate. Females lay in late summer and fall. The eggs overwinter — and this is the only stage that survives a Michigan winter, which is why a hard freeze wipes out every adult and the woods go silent until the following summer. Nymphs hatch in spring looking like miniature wingless adults with absurdly long antennae, molt several times through the summer, reach adulthood in mid to late summer, and start calling.

Total lifespan is about a year, with only the last couple of months spent as the winged insect anybody recognizes. That timeline is worth sitting with. The katydid you photograph in August has been alive since spring, has already survived a winter as an egg, and has a matter of weeks left.

Do Katydids Bite?

The only katydids with any reputation for pinching are the coneheads — species with a pointed, cone-shaped projection on the head and correspondingly strong mandibles — and the very large tropical species that turn up in the exotic pet trade. The greater angle-wing in these photographs is a leaf grazer with jaws built for foliage.

Two myths worth killing while we're here. Katydids are not poisonous, to you or to a dog that eats one. And they do not cause warts. That last one traces to a European relative called the wart-biter, named for a folk practice of letting the insect bite warts off.

The Truth About Pink Katydids

Every so often somebody photographs a katydid that's bright bubblegum pink and the picture goes around the internet as a presumed hoax. It's real. The condition is called erythrism — a genetic quirk in pigment production that replaces the normal green with red and pink tones. It's the same class of phenomenon that produces a red-phase screech owl or a strawberry leopard.

You'll see a figure repeated everywhere that pink katydids occur at a rate of one in five hundred. That number comes from a single early-twentieth-century estimate and has been copied forward for over a century without ever being retested. The honest answer is that nobody knows the real rate. What is reasonably clear is that pink individuals are at a serious disadvantage against green summer foliage and get eaten young, which is why pink adults are far rarer than pink hatchlings. Some researchers have suggested the trait may be less costly in spring or fall when foliage color shifts — but that's a hypothesis, not a settled finding.

Katydids in Michigan

Michigan has a solid roster of katydids, and the mix shifts as you move north. Here's what you're most likely to meet in the Lower Peninsula:

Why We Leave Them Alone

Search "katydid" and a significant share of the results will try to sell you something to kill them. Insecticide comparisons. Light traps. Spinosad. "Home repellents." This is worth naming plainly: there is an entire content economy built on manufacturing a pest problem where none exists.

Katydids don't damage a home landscape in any meaningful way. They don't come indoors to breed. They don't bite, sting, or carry disease. What they do is feed a lot of other animals. A greater angle-wing is a two-inch package of protein, and on 30 acres in Gratiot County that matters to more species than most people would guess — screech owls, bats, nighthawks, whip-poor-wills, shrews, opossums, raccoons, spiders, and every songbird that hunts foliage in daylight.

One predator relationship stands out. The great black wasp, Sphex pensylvanicus, hunts angle-wing katydids specifically. The female paralyzes one, drags it to an underground burrow, lays a single egg on it, and seals the chamber. If you want great black wasps on your land — and you should, they're outstanding pollinators — you need katydids. Kill the katydids and the wasps have nothing to provision with.

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