Texas Areas Battle Plague Invasion of Crickets
Pastor Dale Morgan
Jul 26, 3:36 PM EDT
*
Texas Areas Battle Plague Invasion of Crickets*
By KELLEY SHANNON
Associated Press Writer
AUSTIN (AP) -- They congregate on patios, slip into stairwells and, if
they're crunched under foot, oh do they stink. Crickets are here in
force, annoying Texans earlier than usual - thanks to the year's wet
weather in much of the state.
The problem is so bad at the University of Texas at Austin that school
officials are taking the unusual step of darkening the 307-foot-tall
bell tower for three nights the next two weekends in hopes of keeping
the insects away. The bugs are attracted to lights.
Tower lights will be turned off early Friday evening through Sunday
night, and again for three nights the following weekend, Aug. 3-5.
"The tower is one of their primary targets, of course, because we do
have the lights on there," said Bill Lucas, associate director of
facilities maintenance at UT-Austin. He said the crickets gather atop
the tower on its observation deck.
"I don't know if they go up there for the view," he mused.
Crickets seem to like hanging out well above street level at other
downtown buildings. Clusters of crickets have been gathering on the
ninth-floor balcony outside the Austin office where Lisa Lucero works.
She's not amused.
"It's just awful," she said. "They can jump so high. They're irritating
and creepy."
Reports of cricket invasions also are coming from counties in the Hill
Country and northeast Texas and from Dallas, said Mike Merchant, a
Dallas-based entomologist with the Texas Cooperative Extension of the
Texas A&M University System.
Typically, field crickets head into cities from their normal rural
habitat in early fall for mating flights after rain, once the ground
becomes soft enough for egg-laying, Merchant said. This year, after
weeks of soaking summer rain, the ground is soft earlier than usual.
The result, Merchant said, is a "cricket rush."
Though some places are reporting more crickets than anyone can remember,
others are simply experiencing them sooner.
Turning off outdoor lights is the best way to curb the cricket
onslaught, he said. Once they land at urban buildings, grackles and
pigeons eat some of the crickets.
The insects don't cause any serious damage, but they are an aesthetic
pest with their droppings and odor, Merchant said. They can, however,
pose a problem for museums because dead crickets in a museum attract
other insects that feed on them - and on the artifacts, he said.
Cleaning up the crickets can become a huge, repetitive chore, according
to those who do that nasty job.
"They're a general nuisance. There is the crunching under foot. They die
and smell terrible. The smell gets sucked into the air conditioning
system," said Lucas, adding that the odor creates an unpleasant work
environment in the campus' main building where the tower is located.
University workers began noticing the problem about a week ago and have
been gathering cricket information from a campus entomology expert and
from the Texas Cooperative Extension.
"They didn't quite say it was of biblical proportions, but it sure seems
that way at times," Lucas said.
---
On the Net: