Dac Crossley's Western Blog: A Few Notes on Crickets

Irene Black suggested that I do a blog entry about crickets. Nice idea. Thanks, Irene.

Check Wikipedia first; I always do. There’s plenty of information there about crickets, including a lot of interesting folklore. I remembered that Chinese people kept crickets as pets (you can still buy cricket cages on-line). Charles Dickens wrote about a house cricket: “The Cricket on the Hearth.”

House crickets likely originated in desert regions, possibly in Asia. They thrive at high temperatures – 85 to 90 degrees F. – and prefer low humidity. Crickets as a group are common world-wide, especially tree crickets here in the southeast and field crickets in the southwest.

In the old days I found crickets useful in my research. House crickets aren’t much of a pest problem – they really aren’t harmful anyplace, except for the noise they make – but they’re easy to find. House crickets are sold as fish bait; there’s a plentiful supply.

I needed a test insect species for studies of radioactive materials, and crickets filled the bill. I could buy them by the thousands; no need to keep colonies of them (but I did learn – don’t feed them Chick Starter Mash. You Ag types would know that starter mash is medicated. It kills crickets by destroying the microbes in their intestines. Like you and me, crickets have a symbiotic gut flora.).

In Civil Defense days I was asked, would insects survive a nuclear attack? Crickets helped me to solve a sticky little problem.

People who’d irradiated insects previously had reported that, at low doses of radiation exposure, some kinds of beetles tended to live a little bit longer. Never much, and hard to prove, but it was fodder for the “deniers” of that day. Maybe a little radiation is actually good for you!

We found that groups of crickets exposed to 1,000 R of gamma radiation would live an extra day or two, on the average. (That would instantly kill you or me). And then the answer emerged from the data.

The males died on schedule. Only the females lived a bit longer.

Because – they were sterilized and didn’t lay eggs! Laying eggs (or giving birth) is hazardous to your health; those females were given an extra day or two of life, by virtue of becoming sterile. This explains the results found earlier with beetles. The precise ages of the beetles weren’t known, and sexes weren’t accounted for in the analysis.

Thank you, house crickets.

p.s. Radiation is not good for you – not even a little bit. And some insects would likely survive a nuclear attack, especially if they happen to be flies.

(and thanks to Dave Reichle, Ed Menhick, Al Shinn and Marvin Shanks, who put up with my peccadilloes).

Comments

Nice entry, Dac, You mentioned the use of crickets as fish bait. You could have written an entire article about fishing with crickets. One of my all time favorite baits. Especially this time of year when the bream go on the bed.

Posted by: Ed Underwood | March 17, 2008 at 11:29 AM