Mormon Crickets
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Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is the Weather Notebook. Mormon crickets got their name in 1848 when hordes of the insects began a culinary seige on the crops of early Mormon pioneers in Utah. The story goes that when the settlers prayed for help, hordes of seagulls suddenly appeared and ate enough crickets to save their crops and lives.

This summer, Utah has one of the worst cricket infestations in years. I talked to state entomologist, Ed Bianco in Salt Lake City who told me that the weather has been near ideal for the insects to breed and spread.

EB: Conditions were very good for egglaying last summer. The winter was relatively mild. Conditions were optimum for egg hatch this spring, so all those factors put together just helped to have an increased cricket population this year.

BY: What does it look like to see a bunch of these crickets foraging or have you heard horror stories from farmers saying "hey, look what happened to my crops".

EB: No, I haven't heard the horror stories. I've been out there and actually seen the horror stories happen. We can have crickets as dense, if you can imagine this, as one hundred per square yard. That's not uncommon, and those crickets are actually around two to three inches long and about as big around as the average persons index finger.

BY: Has this been the worst year that you remember for the Mormon Crickets?

EB: This is probably been one of our worst years, and with the records that we have in some parts of the state it's probably the worst year that we've had in the last forty years.

That's Ed Bianco, Utah's state entomologist who's based in Salt Lake City. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory, supported generously by the National Science Foundation.