Millions of the flightless Mormon crickets have flooded Nevada, frightening locals, covering streets and buildings, and causing nightmares.
Six Nevada counties are under attack, as seen in footage posted on social media and by local news organisations, with thick beds of insects scooting across the state with efficiency. According to a representative for the Northeastern Nevada Regional facility, the facility had to use brooms and leaf blowers to clear the way for patients to enter the building. The bugs not only provide horrifying sights and films that resemble the plague, but when a lot of them are crushed, they also make roads treacherous. They are struck by a car, two or three of them emerge and devour their friend, then they are struck by another car. Six Neroads can get covered with crickets and they can get slick," Jeff Knight, an entomologist for the Nevada agriculture department, reportedly told KSL. The footage was posted on social media and by local news organisations. We've had a number of accidents that were brought on by crickets, but the major problem is these afternoon thunderstorms; add a little water to that and everything gets slick.
According to the University of Nevada, Reno, despite their moniker, the insects are actually huge shield-backed katydids that resemble grasshoppers rather than biological crickets. They walk or hop instead of flying.
In the summer, they lay eggs that hibernate in the winter before hatching in the spring. However, this year's exceptionally wet winter meant that the hatchlings were delayed. According to Knight, the enormous number of insects travelling across Nevada can peak for four to six years before being brought under control by other insects and predators.
"The band of crickets in Elko [Nevada] is probably a thousand acres, and we've had bands even bigger than that," he remarked. "They probably began hatching because of the drought. Once they do, they gain the upper hand, and their populations rise for a while before declining.
Since 1976, Knight has been eradicating Mormon crickets from Nevada's agriculture, and throughout that time there have been around 40 outbreaks. He claimed that over the past five years, large populations of crickets have been travelling through Elko and other towns. As with butterflies, they may be seeking additional room rather than necessarily migrating from one location to another.
They start saying, "There's too many of us here, we've got to start moving," because of [population density].
For more than a century, Mormon crickets have been a problem for farmers in the western United States. They got their name because, in the middle of the 19th century, swarms of the insects decimated the fields of Mormon settlers in Utah. Since then, they have persisted in destroying some of the state's most lucrative crops, including corn, oats, wheat, rye and barley, according to Utah State University.
The US Department of Agriculture has been tasked with assisting states in stopping the destruction of rangeland and crops by grasshoppers and Mormon crickets since the 1930s. Idaho, Montana, Utah, and other western governments have likewise poured millions of dollars on suppression. Oregon, for instance, allotted $5 million in 2021 to evaluate and develop one such programme, according to the Associated Press.