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Posted in Interesting Bugs

Insect Disguised as Leaf: What is It?

We received a very strange question involving a “tiny sucker mouth” (or suckermouth) and what may be a type of insect disguised as a leaf (a “greenish, grey leaf,” more precisely) from a reader recently. The reader was out trapping minnows in a small pond in Wyoming when he came across a leaf insect (or whatever it is), and at first he didn’t know what he was looking at. However, when he poked the (evidently) living leaf, which is about the size of a nickel, it curled up. The insect that looks like leaf, if it is an insect, eventually stretched back out, revealing a whitish underside and, more surprisingly, the “tiny sucker mouth” mentioned earlier. The reader has “no clue” what he found, so he wrote to see if we might be able to identify the insect leaf with a sucker mouth (or suckermouth).