They have a triangular, often elongated, head and may be yellow, green, or gray. Some species are mottled and speckled. The white, elongate eggs are 1 mm or less in length. The pale, wingless nymphs are smaller than adults but similar in shape. Leafhoppers are common throughout the eastern United States and occur in all areas of North Carolina.
Leafhoppers infest several hundred kinds of cultivated and wild plants.
This type of feeding causes infested areas to have a whitened or bleached appearance. This symptom can be mistaken for drought or disease damage. Newly seeded lawns are sometimes killed by leafhoppers. Resuming activity in the spring, the adults begin to feed and mate. Females insert 75 to several hundred eggs, singly, into the leaf veins of tender new foliage.