Now I’m not a bugaphobe, but I think I’d freak if the ground were positively covered with these honking big crickets, mormon crickets to be precise. 2.5" long. They’re having a plague of them up in Utah, Nevada and Idaho. Gack!
Any of our dopers up there have any cricket anecdotes to relate? I’m particularly fascinated/revolted by the idea of driving down the street and popping millions of crickets like bubble wrap.
Pray for Gulls. (You’ve heard the story, I hope, about how the crickets were eating the early Mormon settlers’ crops and the settlers faced famine. Then gulls flew in off the Great Salt Lake and started scarfing the crickets, thereby saving the crops and the settlers. Now in Salt Lake City there’s a gull monument.)
The camel crickets that inhabit my mother’s laundry room are pretty creepy and can make laundry day an unnerving experience. And I caught a Jerusalem cricket in a cup trap once–it was one of the ugliest things I’d ever seen. Those are about my only cricket adventures.
TheMostDISGUSTINGSound*EVER *:
The crunch-crick, crunck-crackle, munch of your cat eating a cricket.
Let’s see, a cricket anecdote.
Did you know that Brian Lara’s bowling style is the Leg Break Googly?
I forgot about Jerusalem crickets! Also known as potato bugs. Once we found so many when tilling up soil for a garden, that we attracted the attention of a couple of local blue jays. We soon worked out a system that whenever we found a potato bug, we would put it on top of the wall and retreat several yards. A blue jay would immediately swoop down on it and fly triumphantly away, trying to call with his beak full of giant potato bug. Those were some well-fed jays that year.
I have, at any given time, between 25 and 100 crickets in my possession. I keep them in a little “critter keeper” and feed them collard greens, oranges, and crushed lizard food (the lizard won’t eat it directly). I have not discovered any new love for the creatures since I started keeping them. And a lizard eating crickets makes almost the same “crunch-crick, crunck-crackle” as a cat does, only they eat faster.
Are “Mormon crickets” any relation to cicadas? We have those here.
This is even ickier than the Great Gypsy Moth infestations in the northeast. Ew