What are the visual differences in grasshoppers,crickets,and locusts?

Question

What are the visual differences in grasshoppers,crickets,and locusts?

Answer 1

Grasshoppers are medium to large insects. Adult length is 1 to 7 cm, depending on the species. Like their relatives the 'katydids' and 'crickets', they have chewing mouth parts, two pairs of wings, one narrow and tough, the other wide and flexible, and long hind legs for jumping. They are different from these groups in having short antennae that don't reach very far back on their bodies. Grasshoppers usually have large eyes, and are coloured to blend into their environment, usually a combination of brown, grey or green.

Adult field and house crickets are recognisable because of the sword-like ovipositor at the end of the abdomen in addition to the two cerci, and fully developed wings. Field crickets are dark brown to black crickets, about 1 inch long. House crickets are smaller (about 3/4 inch long) and yellowish-brown with three dark bands on the head and prothorax. Adult tree crickets are whitish to light green; slender bodied with long antennae. Snowy tree crickets have black spots on the first 2 antennal segments.

Locust is the swarming phase of short-horned grasshoppers of the family Acrididae.

Answer 2

Their color. Look at them through a magnifying glass

Answer 3

Grasshoppers and Locusts are very difficult to tell apart.  The fine details that DO differentiate them are too involved to get into here.

There are many different species of Crickets.  The Cricket you are probably referring to is the one that lives in your garden.  Unlike Grasshoppers, they live on the ground most of the time and feed on decaying vegetation and small plants.  They do not swarm through the sky like Grasshoppers.  And, they do not cause the devastation on crops that Grasshoppers and Locust do.  The garden variety Cricket chirps by means of rough ridges on his wings.  The rate of chirps depends on the air temperature.  You can actually tell the temperature once you learn the number of calls per minute this insect produces for each degree of temperature.

Also, Grasshoppers can get huge while Crickets in comparison are small.