Cricket

by Jacki
(Grand Forks, B.C. Canada)

There are many kinds of crickets - many are predatory, making their homes in dark damp places (such as root cellars) and prey on live insects in some cases, or as scavengers on dead insects.

The field crickets are the biggest and the noisiest, making their summer song in the warm evenings of August into September. Depending on the temperature, their song is slower, or becomes a solid trill when it's warmer.

The tiny California snow cricket is a predator of aphids and other tiny pest creatures, and it's only downfall as the perfect predator is that it lays its eggs in the branches of a plant, inserting several into a row of miniscule holes.

This could be interpreted as being a harmful activity, but the cricket is so tiny that it really doesn't harm the plant much. They have a funny little quirk; if you approach the plant that they're on, they'll scuttle around to the other side (I guess they think that you can't see them there) until you leave.

Female crickets always have a long 'ovipositor' to lay their eggs deep into crevices for safety. The males have a multi pronged apparatus on their tail end so they're easy to tell apart.