Voracious Mormon Cricket on March Across Nevada

They grow as big as a church mouse and can snap a wooden matchstick in two with their jaws. Ugly and ferocious if disturbed, they eat everything in their path--including each other--and travel in giant bands across the land.

Mormon crickets--scourge of an earlier generation of Western farmers--have invaded northeastern Nevada.

Allowed to multiply by four years of drought, the bugs--notorious for their size and insatiable appetite--are hatching by the millions in the mountain canyons outside of Winnemucca, Elko and other rural Nevada outposts, threatening the state’s agricultural heartland.

The infestation is Nevada’s worst since the 1930s, when thousands of acres of crops and rangeland in the northern parts of the state were munched during a decade-long Mormon cricket occupation. Imperiled this time are portions of a five-county region that produces hay crops worth $66 million annually and hosts 2.8 million head of cattle that rely on the range for feed.

“The ground is black with them in some places,” said Robert Gronowski, Nevada’s director of plant industry, who estimates that at least 700,000 acres are infested so far. “They’re little hoppers now, but by June, they’ll be 2 1/2 inches long and pretty scary-looking.”

Spurred by nervous farmers, state and federal agriculture officials last week launched a campaign to poison the insects before they leave the canyons and begin prowling the valley floors where miles and miles of green alfalfa--Nevada’s leading field crop--await them.

Workers are laying strips of a bran-based insecticide across canyon mouths in Humbolt and Pershing counties, and aerial spraying is to begin later this month to combat a smaller infestation near the Shoshone Mountains.

But many farmers worry that the effort is too little, too late.

“Look at them all,” Eldon Crawford said glumly as a mass of the black bugs hopped their way across his 2,000-acre hay crop in Golconda, a tiny settlement east of Winnemucca.

Crawford has hired men to work daily from dawn to nightfall dusting the perimeter of his fields with pesticides, and may soon begin spraying malathion, the same chemical used to battle the Medfly. He has killed thousands of the bugs. But thousands more continue to waltz out of the hills, over their dead cousins and straight into the alfalfa. Crawford figures his entire crop, worth more than $1 million, is at risk.

“They just keep coming,” the farmer said as he kneeled by a hay stem chomped clear down to the desert floor by the bugs. “You knock back one wave with the poison and another comes on in right behind it. If something’s not done, these critters are going to take over the country.”

State agriculture experts are not ready to go that far but concede they have a big problem on their hands: “Wherever we look, we seem to find them,” Gronowski said.

The dry weather, experts say, is mostly to blame.

Mormon crickets always have lived in the hills of northern Nevada, but their population is usually limited by the wet, cold weather of spring. Such conditions kill off large numbers of hatchlings, whose metabolism is slowed by rain and the high desert’s chilly temperatures.

“They need food constantly when they’re young, but when it’s cold and wet, they become more concerned about keeping warm than eating,” said George Nash, a Reno-based plant pathologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “So, basically, they starve to death.”

This spring, however, marks the fourth year of drought in Nevada, and each season, more and more eggs--each female lays about 175--have hatched and survived. If they kept to the canyons, this might not be a problem. But in a phenomenon that mystifies entomologists, Mormon crickets pick up and move once their population reaches a certain level.

Traveling in packs that can stretch miles in length and width, they march across the countryside, denuding the terrain in their endless search for food. Though their stunted wings are useless, the bugs are great hikers, capable of journeying two miles in a single night.

“It’s quite a sight to see them move,” said Robert Bechtel, an entomologist with the Nevada Department of Agriculture. “It’s just this vast, black swarm. It looks like the ground is moving.”

Sage, tarweed and the tender grasses favored by cattle are the bugs’ most common meal, but they also chomp on fruit and vegetables.

“They are essentially feeding and reproductive machines,” said Jeff Knight, a state entomologist.

“I’ve seen what they can do,” added Mike Burke, 47, a cattle rancher who also farms 250 acres in the shadow of the Tobin Mountains in Pershing County. “I won’t sleep outside. There might not be much left of me the next morning.”

The Mormon cricket is found in the mountain canyons of high desert country throughout the Great Basin, as far north as Canada and as far east as the Dakotas. Though it has been spotted in eastern California south to Mono County, no infestations on a par with Nevada’s have been recorded. And this year’s invasion has not yet spread beyond the Silver State.

The bug was first documented as an agricultural pest in Utah in 1848, when a band threatened the crops of Mormon settlers near Salt Lake City. This frightful invasion--which gave the pest its name--was described by Hubert Howe Bancroft in his 1889 book “History of Utah: 1540-1886”:

“They came in a solid phalanx from the direction of Arsenal Hill, darkening the earth in their passage. Men, women, and children turned out en masse to combat this pest, driving them into ditches or on to piles of reeds, which they would set on fire, striving in every way, until strength was exhausted, to beat back the devouring host. But in vain they toiled, in vain they prayed.”

Indeed, it appeared the struggling Mormons would lose all their crops to the gobbling horde. But then, historians say, a flock of sea gulls appeared. As Bancroft tells it, the “snow-white gulls . . . pounced upon the crickets, seizing and swallowing them. They gorged themselves. . . . Verily, the Lord had not forgotten to be gracious!”

Thirty years later, Nevadans experienced their first recorded encounter with the bugs when a band marched through a mining camp in Tuscarora, defoliating its gardens as horrified miners looked on.

The first serious invasion, however, would not occur in Nevada until the drought-stricken 1930s, when insects roved from Elko west toward Winnemucca in bands that stretched up to 12 miles wide.

Entire towns--including the community of Jarbidge--were inhabited by the bugs, and signs reading “Danger: Roads Slippery--Crickets” were posted on highways covered with gooey insect corpses. Railroad travel was interrupted because of tracks made slick by the crushed bugs.

“I remember my grandmother telling me stories of how she’d have to get out and hold the back of the car--it was an Essex--to keep it from slipping off the pavement,” entomologist Bechtel recalled. Accidents on the greasy roads were common.

In 1935, there was no end in sight to the infestation and a joint state and federal program was created to combat it. Primitive camps were established in the desert and staffed with Depression-era workers.

Wearing simple dust masks, these “cricketeers” walked the land, dumping a lethal mix of lime and arsenic in the path of the advancing tide. Others erected low walls of sheet iron along highways and around towns and fields, or built pit-style traps to capture the bugs.

The crude measures did little. By 1940, 1.2 million acres of Nevada were infested, and cattle were driven out of many regions because of range depletion. The outbreak did not subside until 1945.

Though still below the 1930s levels, the current infestation has the potential to surpass it in numbers of bugs and affected acreage, state officials predict.

A hint of the buildup in critters came in 1988, when grower Crawford first spotted “10 or 20 of the buggers” on the edge of his fields.

Last year, things got much worse. Responding to a call last June from an alarmed farmer, state agriculture officials found swarms of full-grown Mormon Crickets pouring out of the canyons near Winnemucca. One band was six miles long.

“They came right on through our place and ate our vegetables, my hollyhocks, the tulips, and the little trees we’d planted,” said Dianna Richards, who lives with her husband, Roger, and two children in Grass Valley. “I was so upset. You try to keep a nice house and these things just move in.”

In Winnemucca, Martin Larraneta’s phone was ringing off the hook.

“People were mad,” said Larraneta, the state’s agricultural supervisor for the area. “The bugs had made it to the edge of town, and they were getting in people’s houses. I had women in here crying about it.”

Mormon crickets aren’t like other crickets. In fact, they’re technically not crickets at all, but members of the long-horned grasshopper family--so named because their antennae are as long as their bodies.

The bugs are big and they don’t make that nice cricket chirp that is so familiar on a summer evening. Their sound is more of a screech--”like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together,” according to one entomologist.

They also spit smelly brown juice if you bother them, and bite hard enough to break the skin, the experts say. “They’ll give you a good chomp,” Larraneta said as he pointed out the impressive lower jaw on a young specimen. “I know a guy who holds them in his hand and let’s them trim his fingernails.”

But it is the Mormon crickets’ startling numbers that make them truly terrifying. In Crawford’s field, there are as many as 100 per square yard. Walk through his alfalfa and the bugs spring all about your feet like black popcorn.

Today’s agriculture officials are certainly better equipped to deal with the pest than their ancestors were half a century ago. The insecticide carboryl, mixed with a tasty wheat bran bait, kills the bugs effectively. Other bugs die when they feast on the victims and get a residual dose.

But there are two problems with this strategy. The numbers are so huge and the infested acreage so vast that thorough treatment is nearly impossible. So far, only three baiting teams--a mere six men--have been assigned to the anti-cricket crusade.

Also, the government pays the total bill only for treatment of public lands; on private property, landowners must bear two-thirds of the burden, a sum of $10 per acre.

“That gets expensive,” said cattleman Donnell (Mick) Richards, who grows alfalfa on his 1,300-acre Sonoma Ranch near Winnemucca. “I’m out back most mornings with a coffee can full of poison, trying to hit the hot spots. But it’s expensive and it takes a lot of time.”

Aerial spraying of carboryl is less costly and more effective, and this technique is to be used on 12,500 acres in Lander and Eureka counties beginning April 23. But federal regulations prohibit aerial spraying within 500 feet of water, so this method cannot be used in the mountain canyons, many of which have natural springs and streams.

“We can’t kill them all, so our goal is to keep them out of the agriculture-producing areas and the towns,” the USDA’s Nash said. “Let’s just pray for a wet, cold spring next year. . . . Because I don’t see any sea gulls around here.”

Cricket Infestation A five-county area of northern Nevada has been infested with Mormon crickets, notoriousfor their large size and voracious appetite. The insects have been found in Humbolt, Lander, Pershing, Eureka and Elko counties. The total infestation covers more than 700,000 acres so far. The largest concentration is in the Winnemucca area.