Insect Picture of the Day

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Today is July 24th, which is a state holiday in Utah. It’s Pioneer Day here, comemmorating the arrival of the first mormon immigrants to the Salt Lake Valley in 1847.

When they arrived, the Salt Lake Valley was nothing but a huge stretch of hard clay desert, with a giant lake of salt at the bottom of it. The mormons said “this is the right place” anyway, and started farming. Oh, the wacky fun they had trying to farm the desert! But they did it–and just as the crops were coming in, the skies were darkened by clouds of crickets descending on their new crops.

Well, they weren’t really crickets. They’re actually a type of shieldback katydid, but they are a unique species and so bear their common name “mormon cricket”.

Mormon crickets eat everything in sight, including each other when they run out of other food. (In fact, one recent study’s findings were that mormon crickets migrate because they want to eat the cricket in front of them—and not be eaten by the cricket behind.) The pioneers were saved when flocks of seagulls suddenly arrived and ate the crickets.

Mormon crickets get over 7cm long. A friend once drove a highway and observed about one cricket in every square foot of the highway, and then shuddered to discovere that it was not actually a “swarm” year. In swarm years, you can’t see the asphalt at all. They are still a problem in farming areas of Utah. Nowadays we rely on insecticides. The seagulls are still here, but apparently they’d rather hang out at the landfill.

I have to confess that I mined this image off the Internet. I didn’t realize until two days ago that I needed to get a picture of a mormon cricket for today, and they’re not exactly plentiful anymore, at least not in the urban areas of Utah. So I pulled this image from wikipedia. The image is copyrighted under the GNU Free Documentation License, which means I am obligated to tell you that:

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this image under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.