Grasshoppers, Crickets & Locusts
The jumping, singing insects of summer, and the swarming locust phase that can strip fields bare. These guides cover cricket song, grasshopper anatomy, the locust swarm trigger, and their life cycles.
Mostly harmless music-makers; a few can strip a crop under the right conditions. Backyard numbers are rarely a problem.
Size
5 to 130 mm
varies widely
Diet
Grasses and leaves
some crickets scavenge
Habitat
Fields and gardens
crickets come indoors
Sound
Songs by stridulation
rubbing wings or legs
Jump
20 body lengths
in a single leap
Life cycle
No caterpillar or grub stage: a young grasshopper is a wingless copy of the adult.
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Egg Laid in a pod in the soil in late summer, where it overwinters until spring.
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Nymph A tiny wingless version of the adult that hatches and starts eating and hopping at once.
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Adult It molts through several stages, growing wings at the last, then sings out the summer.
A summer field is basically an orchestra, and once you learn who's playing what, you can survey a meadow with your ears in the dark. The cricket thermometer genuinely works, too; I've checked it against a real one more than once.
Sam Fielding · field note · about Sam
Typical season
Adults sing from midsummer to first frost; crickets carry on indoors.
Often confused with
Caterpillars
Soft and legless-looking by comparison; these hoppers have hard bodies and big back legs
A grasshopper can leap twenty times its body length, the equivalent of a person clearing a school bus from standing.
Grasshoppers
The daytime jumpers. Short antennae, powerful back legs, and a taste for grasses. Mostly harmless in a garden unless numbers spike.
Start here
Count a cricket's chirps for fourteen seconds and add forty; you'll have the temperature in Fahrenheit within a degree or two.
Crickets
The night singers. Long antennae, flattened bodies, and the chirp everyone knows. Harmless, and a good-luck charm in more than one culture.
A grasshopper and a locust can be the same species; crowding flips a switch that changes its color, body, and behavior into swarm mode.
Locusts
Grasshoppers with a dark setting. Under crowding, certain species transform and swarm, the only ones here that become a genuine crop threat.