A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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spittlebug
A spittlebug is the nymph of a small sap-sucking insect that surrounds itself with a mass of froth on a plant stem, which is where the common name comes from. The froth is made from the insect’s own liquid waste, whipped with air through a set of valves, and it protects the soft nymph from drying out, from temperature, and from most predators. The adult is a leafhopper called a froghopper.
Etymology
The English name is for the appearance and the froth is also called cuckoo spit, on an old belief that it appeared with the cuckoo, which it does, without either being responsible for the other. Several European languages arrived at the same image, and the German and French names both involve saliva.
Notes
The adult froghopper is the highest jumper of any animal relative to its size, launching at over 400 times gravity using a catapult mechanism that stores energy in a protein spring and releases it in under a millisecond, which is far too fast for muscle to be doing the work directly. It clears more than two feet, which is around a hundred times its own body length.