A STRANGE PET

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 152, 24 December 1935, Page 8

A STRANGE PET

GRASSHOPPER ON SHIP

(From "The Post's" Representative.) ; ' SYDNEY, December 12. Mary, a Queensland grasshopper is the weird pet of the British motorship Orari, which recently, reached Sydney from Liverpool. A timid, terrified creature when she joined the Orari in June last, at Gladstone, Queensland; when the vessel was loading for the return trip to England, Mary is now tame and confident. She lives in state in the ship's chart-room, where she was found when the vessel put out from Gladstone. She was fluttering round minus her hind legs, and as an experiment the master of the Orari, Captain J. G. Allmond, put the grasshopper in a cage and fed it to see how long it would live. The whole crew were confident that Mary would not last the trip round this Australian coast, but Mary has survived fierce tropical storms and the chill of the English autumn, and is now back in her native land as full of life as ever. "When she first joined the Orari," said Captain Allmond, "we [christened her Felix, but before we haa left Australia a baby grasshopper was found alongside our pet. That's why we call her Mary now. The little grasshopper did; not take to the sea and died."

Mary's diet is no problem. She eats well on lettuce leaves and apple cores. Whether she will yield'to homesickness and desert the Orari in a Queensland port is a problem worrying the ship's crew. •■- ; ■ • -• • ■