Animals: Crickets

The rats, lice, cockroaches, spiders, ants, flies, snakes, frogs, toads and waterbugs that make their home in the municipal dump of Lynn, Mass, spent an unhappy week, their second unhappy week since the cool September nights began. Upon them, even when it was not raining, had descended tons and tons of water. Then came gases, liquid chemicals. Now came fire. The dump was surrounded and assaulted by blueshirted firemen, bent not on putting the fire out but on spreading it. Soon the dump became a truly impossible place to live in and a great many prudent roaches and rats began moving out, to take up safer quarters in the town. The human residents of Lynn found this exasperating as well as unpleasant, for the real objects of their warfare on the dump, the crickets of Lynn, remained apparently undiscomfited and serene.

Lynn’s plague of crickets began in August. Never before had the town heard such nocturnal stridulation, never before had such hosts of shiny, self-assured intruders appeared out of floor chinks, clothes closets, rugs, pantries and cellars. Lynn’s fire department, called out to purge the dump whence the cricket hosts seemed to emanate, was repeatedly baffled. Professional exterminators say that the only way to get rid of crickets is to feed them bits of fish or vegetables coated with chemicals, chiefly arsenic. Crickets are guzzlers of beer and sweetened vinegar, may be trapped and drowned in deep glass vessels half-filled with either.

Everyone knows that the cricket produces its chirps by rubbing one fore wing across the other. With a microscope and sound camera Entomologist Frank Eugene Lutz of the American Museum of Natural History lately discovered that a cricket, outheifetzing Heifetz, makes a full-tone slur downward from the fifth “D” above middle “C” in one-fiftieth of a second. It makes four of these notes, separated by infinitesimal pauses, at each stroke of its bow. The cricket’s stridor is a love song, produced only by the adult male. When the bemused female approaches he tones down his serenade, strokes her with lustful antennae.

Some people find the cricket’s song strangely soothing. To other people the insect is an unredeemed pest. Besides making a noise, which it hushes when irate insomniacs turn on lights to search it out, the cricket eats clothes, rugs, furniture, meat, bread, vegetables.

Far different is the cricket’s status in Italy, North Africa and Japan, where it is prized for its song, kept in cages. In China the cricket comes into its own. Chinese like its monotonous chirping, which resembles their own music, and think it lucky. Twelve centuries ago palace ladies were keeping crickets by their bedsides in golden cages. Peasants made tiny bamboo cricket cages which they carried in their bosoms or swung from their girdles. During the Sung dynasty (A. D. 960-1280) Chinese began encouraging their crickets to fight each other.

The Chinese cricket-lover lives in a bedlam. Several rooms of his house are stacked high with jars of crickets. Exhaustive manuals tell him what to feed each species at each meal (sick crickets get a special diet of red waterbugs).