They can crawl just about anywhere, and their chirping can be a nuisance, but the positives of crickets can outweigh the negatives.
While there is a wide diversity of crickets, the most common species found in Saskatchewan is the Fall Field Cricket. They are about an inch long, black in colour, and relatively robust with a very distinct chirp.
According to Provincial Entomologist with the Ministry of Agriculture, Dr. James Tansey, crickets are very curious insects that can get into tight spaces looking for food.
“They’re curious little animals and they can squish their bodies down into tight spaces and into tight holes. They’ll just crawl into structures of all kinds,” Tansey explained.
Additionally, Tansey said crickets have relatively large structures called mushroom bodies, which are the equivalent of a cerebral cortex in vertebrates that helps with cognition. This makes them relatively “smart” or “clever” insects.
“Other animals you would see with large mushroom bodies include honeybees, which is a good example,” said Tansey.
Crickets are omnivores that will eat just about anything. They’ve been known to feed on a variety of fruit plants, foliage, flowers, and seeds. They will also feed on other insects and even other crickets.
However, crickets are recognized, especially in the agriculture sector, for feeding on grasshoppers and primarily grasshopper eggs.
“They will happily go down the burrows where grasshoppers lay their eggs, dig them up late in the season about this time of year, and happily munch on those eggs,” Tansey commented.
Tansey added that he’s seen crickets eat already dead grasshoppers and he’s seen crickets gang up on live grasshoppers. So, while they can be a nuisance getting into stored food and living in houses and garages while constantly chirping, they have a positive impact from an agricultural perspective.
Tansey cautioned that crickets have done direct damage to crops and need to be controlled, but it is not understood why. It’s believed they may have eaten themselves out of other potential food sources and resorted to eating crops.
Crickets can live in a broad range of environments and can be found across the Great Plains. That being said, the Fall Field Cricket is a grassland animal.
As far as crop pests go, Tansey said it wasn’t as bad of a year for grasshoppers as originally expected and, with harvest underway, insects become less prominent.
Tansey has also received a number of calls from residents about Murder Hornets (official name is Northern Giant Hornets). He said they have not been detected in Saskatchewan and what people are seeing are doppelgangers. He explained they are either yellowjacket queens in their later stages starting to fly or banded horntails, which are large herbivorous wasps that have no interest in stinging humans and are more interested in laying eggs in sick or dying trees.
If you happen to see any of these species, Tansey recommended taking a picture and submitting it to the Ministry of Agriculture while keeping the animal alive, as it is likely a native species that is important to the ecosystem.