BUGLAND: Fanny Get Your Gun

With striking red-and-black stripes, some people say that leafhoppers are among the most beautiful of insects. Body markings are not the only remarkable feature about the leafhopper cuerna, which live on grasses and low plants across North and Central America. It is a member of the “sharpshooter” subfamily — called that for a reason. Sharpshooters feed voraciously on the the watery sap inside plants. And by voraciously, we’re talking the equivalent of a human drinking 400 gallons of water a day. Yowza! What goes in must come out — hence this little squirt’s name. Bug experts estimate leafhoppers shoot liquid bullets from their rear ends almost every second, with the precision of, you guessed it, a sharpshooter. This leafhopper was photographed at Bluff Lake by Mark Silverstein.