The Backyard Arthropod Project

While cleaning up some stuff in the basement, out of the corner of my eye I spotted something bounding up in the air. And by “bounding”, I mean getting up about two feet off the floor. So I went to investigate, and found this:

OK, so this is clearly something in the order Orthoptera - grasshoppers, katydids and crickets. Here’s an opportunity to use this great book that I just got a few weeks ago: The Orthoptera of Michigan[1]. It only took a minute or two to sort out that it’s a “Camel Cricket”, genus Ceuthophilus. The winglessness, humped back, long legs, and very long antennae made it pretty easy to make the match.

The antennae are very long, I had to take a long shot in order to get them all in. I’d say they are easily twice the length of the body:

It looks to have an ovipositor, so I’d say it is most likely a female. It looks like the males have significantly shorter abdomens in most species. She’s got some pretty pronounced spines on the hind legs, too, which look like they’d be a problem for anything that wanted to eat her[2]:

So, anyway, this isn’t the type of cricket we usually see, normally we get the jet-black field crickets that chirp by rubbing their wings together. This one has no wings, so obviously isn’t going to do much chirping.  The long legs seem to help it jump a long way (it could jump almost 2 feet in the air), but it seemed to have a long cycle time between jumps, so it was relatively easy to catch it.  In comparison, the comparatively short-legged field crickets only jump a few inches at a time, but they can jump every second or so, which actually makes them a bit harder for me to catch.

Camel crickets eat pretty much anything organic they find, and like to hang out in protected places like the undersides of logs, under rocks, leaf litter, caves, and (obviously) basements. They like a bit of moisture, so they do well in a somewhat damp environment, and they evidently like things a bit on the cool side.

Orthoptera of Michigan  gives a few methods for catching crickets on purpose, as opposed to just grabbing them as the opportunity arises: (1) leave a small pile of dry oatmeal in the woods to attract foragers, and check on it very early in the morning; (2) find a bare spot on the ground, and prop up a board over it so that crickets looking for a hideout will crawl under it; (3) make a pitfall trap from a cup buried up to its top in the ground, with molasses in the bottom for bait; and (4) smear treetrunks with molasses. It sounds like these methods will probably attract quite a variety of small crawling things, not just crickets. I need to try a few of them this summer.

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[1] By Roger G. Bland, Published in 2003 by Michigan State University, Extension Bulletin E-2815. It has color photographs and everything, along with full-blown identification keys. I love these guides that are specific to the region where I am - the region-specificity really weeds out a lot of extraneous possibilities, allowing me to focus right in on the relevant stuff. Most insect guides for North America seem to have about 90% of their entries consisting of things from Florida, Texas, or California that wouldn’t be caught dead this far north. The MSU Cooperative Exension Service has a lot of really good local guides: I have the ones for butterflies, grasshoppers, snakes, turtles, amphibians, and Insects of the Great Lakes Region.

[2] “Do not try to eat the large grasshopper legs, as they have barbs that may stick in your throat.” (from the U.S. Army Survival Manual, FM 21-76, page 1 of chapter 7, “Wildlife for Food”). Sounds like good advice to me!

Other articles related to this topic:

• Field Crickets
• Black-Etched Prominent Caterpillar
• Stone Centipede
• House Pseudoscorpion
• Freshwater Amphipod - Gammarus