Bug swarm: Nevada crawling with thick carpet of Mormon crickets

Millions of flightless insects known as Mormon crickets have descended across Nevada, alarming residents, blanketing roadways and buildings, and fueling nightmares.

Footage shared on social media and by local news outlets captures six Nevada counties under siege, with thick carpets of bugs moving slowly and efficiently across the state. A local hospital had to deploy brooms and leafblowers to clear the way for patients to get into the building, a spokesperson for the Northeastern Nevada Regional Hospital, told local news outlet KSL.

Not only do the bugs make for terrifying plague-like images and videos, they make roadways dangerous when large numbers of them get crushed.

“They get run over, two or three come out and eat their buddy, and they get run over, and the roads can get covered with crickets and they can get slick,” Jeff Knight, an entomologist for the Nevada agriculture department, also told KSL. “The bigger issue is these afternoon thunderstorms and put a little water on that and it gets slick, we’ve had a number of accidents caused by crickets.”

Despite their name, the insects are not biologically crickets but technically large shield-backed katydids that closely resemble grasshoppers, according to the University of Nevada, Reno. They don’t fly, and instead walk or hop.

They lay eggs in the summer, which lie dormant in the winter and then hatch in the spring. But this year, due to an unusually rainy winter, the hatchlings were delayed. The large number of insects moving across Nevada can remain at their peak for four to six years, before being brought back under control by other insects and predators, Knight told the Guardian.

“The band of crickets in Elko [Nevada] is probably a thousand acres, and we’ve had bands even bigger than that,” he said. “The drought is probably what triggered them to start hatching. Once they do they have the upper hand, so their populations increase for several years then drop off.”

Knight has been treating Nevada’s farmland for Mormon crickets since 1976 and has experienced about 40 outbreaks in that time. He said the high populations of crickets have been moving through Elko and other towns for the past few years. They are not necessarily migrating from one specific place to another, like butterflies do, rather they’re likely looking for more space.

“[Population density] is what triggers them to say, ‘There’s too many of us here, we’ve got to start moving.’”

Mormon crickets have been a thorn in the side of farmers in the American west for more than a century. They earned the name because swarms of the insects destroyed the fields of Mormon settlers in Utah in the mid-19th century. Since then they have continued to devastate corn, oats, wheat, rye and barley, some of the state’s most profitable crops, according to Utah State University.

Since the 1930s, the US agriculture department has been charged with helping states stop grasshoppers and Mormon crickets from destroying rangeland and crops. Western states such as Montana, Utah and Idaho have also spent millions of dollars on suppression. For example, in 2021 Oregon allocated $5m to assess and create one such program, according to the Associated Press.

cover photo:A woman holds a Mormon cricket in her hand. The crickets can make roadways dangerous when large numbers of them get crushed. Photograph: Claire Rush/AP