Crickipedia

01What is a cricket?

Crickets are insects in the order Orthoptera — the same broad group as grasshoppers and locusts — but they sit on a separate branch called Ensifera, distinguished by their long, whip-like antennae. Grasshoppers, by contrast, have stubby antennae. If you remember nothing else about telling them apart: long antennae = cricket, short antennae = grasshopper.

The narrowest definition — the family Gryllidae, the "true crickets" — contains around 2,400 species worldwide. The wider superfamily Grylloidea, which most modern entomologists prefer, lifts that to over 4,700 species by including tree crickets, ground crickets, scaly crickets, and several others that used to be lumped in.

Add in the things commonly called crickets but in different families — mole crickets, cave crickets, Jerusalem crickets, katydids — and the count climbs higher still. The full order Orthoptera contains around 29,000 described species.

Crickets are found on every continent except Antarctica, and at every latitude up to about 55°N or 55°S. North of that — most of Scotland, Scandinavia, Canada — it's simply too cold for them to complete their lifecycle.

02Anatomy

A cricket's body has the standard insect three-part plan — head, thorax, abdomen — but several parts are unusual enough to be worth knowing by name.

Head

Round and compact, with two large compound eyes giving wide-angle vision and three small ocelli (single-lens eyes) on the forehead that detect light intensity. The mouthparts are mandibulate — designed for chewing — and powerful enough that a large cricket can deliver a noticeable nip if mishandled.

The most striking feature is the pair of antennae, often longer than the entire body. These are studded with thousands of microscopic sensors detecting smell, taste, touch, humidity, and air movement. A cricket "sees" its environment largely through them.

Thorax & legs

Six legs, in three specialised pairs:

Front legs — slim and ordinary at first glance, but each carries a tympanal organ: an actual ear. The cricket's eardrums are on its knees. This is one of evolution's odder design choices, though it makes some sense — a leg-mounted ear can be steered toward a sound source by moving the leg.

Middle legs — walking legs, nothing remarkable.

Hind legs — massively enlarged at the femur (the upper segment), packed with muscle. A field cricket can launch itself 30 times its body length in a single jump, accelerating at over 300g. The trade-off is that they're not great fliers; many species have wings but rarely use them.

Wings

Two pairs. The forewings (called tegmina) are stiff and leathery — they aren't really for flying but for singing. The hindwings, when present, are membranous and folded fan-like beneath the tegmina. Many cricket species are partially or fully flightless; some species have both winged and wingless forms within the same population.

Abdomen

The abdomen ends in a pair of slender, antenna-like appendages called cerci — sensory organs that detect air currents from behind, including the air-puff of an approaching predator. Combined with the antennae at the front, this gives a cricket near 360-degree environmental awareness.

In females, between the cerci sits a long, needle-like ovipositor — used to insert eggs into soil or plant tissue. The presence and length of the ovipositor is the easiest way to tell a female cricket from a male.

03The song

Only male crickets sing. The mechanism is called stridulation, and despite sounding like a simple buzz it's a precision instrument.

Along the underside of one forewing runs a row of 50 to 250 hardened teeth, like a tiny comb (the file). On the other forewing, near the inner edge, sits a hard ridge (the scraper). The cricket lifts its wings at about a 45° angle and rapidly draws the scraper of one wing across the file of the other, producing a sequence of pulses. Each tooth hit is one pulse; a typical "chirp" is a burst of three or four pulses lasting a tiny fraction of a second.

The frequency of the resulting sound depends on how fast the teeth are struck:

What makes the sound carry is a remarkable bit of biology: a thin, drum-like region of the wing called the harp or mirror resonates at the cricket's exact song frequency, dramatically amplifying it. A 2 cm cricket can be heard from 50 metres or more.

Four songs, not one

Crickets don't have just one song — most species have a small repertoire, used for different purposes:

The calling song is the one you hear from a distance: loud, steady, advertising "I'm here, I'm a male, I'm available."

The courtship song is much quieter and more elaborate, sung only after a female has approached. Think of it as the difference between a busker's busking and the actual song they perform on stage.

The aggression song is a sharp, irregular series of chirps used to drive off rival males who've crossed into their territory.

The post-copulatory song — yes, really — is sung after mating, possibly to keep the female nearby long enough for sperm transfer to complete.

The Oecanthus trick

Tree crickets in the genus Oecanthus have evolved an extraordinary refinement: they chew a roughly cricket-shaped hole in a leaf, position themselves so the wings span the hole, and use the surrounding leaf as a baffle to project sound forward. It's the insect equivalent of a megaphone, and it makes their song among the loudest produced by any cricket relative to body size.

04The temperature trick

Crickets are ectotherms — cold-blooded. Their muscle activity, including the wing movements that produce song, runs faster when warm and slower when cold. The link between temperature and chirp rate is so consistent in some species that you can read the temperature off the song with surprising accuracy.

The American physicist Amos Dolbear formalised this in 1897 in a short paper titled The Cricket as a Thermometer. His formula, originally derived from the snowy tree cricket (Oecanthus fultoni), is:

The Celsius equivalent:

Why the snowy tree cricket?

Of all crickets, Oecanthus fultoni sings with metronome-like regularity within a species. Field crickets, by comparison, chirp in irregular bursts and individuals vary wildly. The snowy tree cricket's chirps are clean, evenly spaced, and lock to temperature so reliably that the species earned the popular name "thermometer cricket" long before Dolbear wrote anything down. American naturalists in the 1800s already knew the rule of thumb.

The minimum temperature

Below about 13°C / 55°F, most cricket species stop chirping altogether — there isn't enough muscle power to drive the wings. Above about 35°C / 95°F, they also stop, this time to avoid overheating. Cricket song is therefore both a thermometer and a phenology marker: hearing crickets means the night is somewhere in the cricket-friendly band.

For a working version of Dolbear's formula running on your phone, see the Cricket Thermometer on the homepage.

05Lifecycle

Crickets undergo incomplete metamorphosis (the technical term is hemimetabolous). Unlike butterflies or beetles, there is no pupa: the young hatch looking like miniature, wingless versions of the adult and grow by progressive moulting.

Egg

The female uses her ovipositor to insert eggs into damp soil, plant stems, or leaf tissue, depending on species. A typical female lays 50–400 eggs over her lifetime. Eggs are usually elongated, banana-shaped, and 2–3 mm long.

In temperate species like the European field cricket, eggs laid in summer don't hatch until the following spring — the eggs diapause through the cold months. In tropical species and indoor populations of Acheta domesticus, eggs hatch in 1–2 weeks.

Nymph

A newly hatched cricket — called a nymph — is pale, almost translucent, and a few millimetres long. As it eats, it grows. But because the exoskeleton can't stretch, growth happens in jumps: the cricket sheds its old skin (moults) and emerges slightly larger and softer, hardening over a few hours.

Most species go through 8 to 12 nymphal stages ("instars"), with wings and reproductive organs developing progressively. A field cricket might take 2–3 months to reach adulthood in summer warmth; the same species takes nearly a year if its development overwinters.

Adult

Adulthood begins after the final moult, when functional wings and reproductive organs appear. Most cricket species are univoltine — one generation per year — though tropical and indoor species can produce multiple generations.

Adult lifespan is short. A wild adult cricket typically lives 6 to 12 weeks. Captive house crickets, fed and protected, can reach 6 months. The species' overall survival strategy is to overwinter as eggs (or in some species, as late-instar nymphs), emerge in spring, breed in summer, and die in autumn — leaving the next year's eggs in the ground.

06What they eat

Crickets are omnivores, and not picky ones. A typical wild cricket diet includes: seeds, leaves, decaying plant matter, fungi, dead and live insects, dropped fruit, and the occasional bit of carrion. They will eat their own moulted skins and, when desperate, each other (cannibalism is common in crowded conditions).

Different subfamilies lean different ways:

Tree crickets (Oecanthinae) are mainly carnivores — they eat aphids, scale insects, and other small soft-bodied pests, making them genuinely beneficial to gardeners despite the female's habit of cutting twigs to lay eggs in.

Field crickets (Gryllinae) are the broadest omnivores — plants and animals in roughly equal measure. They will graze on grass shoots and seedlings (sometimes a problem in agriculture) but will also eat the eggs and larvae of pest moths.

Ground crickets (Nemobiinae) tend toward seeds and leaf litter, with detritus making up a larger share than in other groups.

07Where they live

Different cricket subfamilies have evolved into different parts of the landscape, and you can roughly predict where you'll find each by listening for where its song is coming from.

Ground level

Field crickets dig short burrows in soil — usually under a stone, log, or grass tussock — and sing from the entrance. The burrow doubles as a daytime hideout, a refuge from predators, and a resonant chamber that amplifies the song.

Mole crickets live almost entirely underground in damp soil, with massively modified front legs adapted for digging like the mammal they're named for. They sing from a Y-shaped burrow chamber that acts as a horn — some species are loud enough to be heard from over a kilometre away.

Bull crickets (genus Brachytrupes), the largest crickets at up to 5 cm long, dig burrows over a metre deep — among the deepest of any insect.

Vegetation

Tree crickets live in shrubs and tree branches, often well off the ground. Their pale green or whitish bodies blend into leaves, and their song is typically a long, sustained trill rather than discrete chirps.

Bush-crickets (Tettigoniidae — technically a different family but commonly called crickets) live in tall grasses and bushes. Most are excellent at camouflage; the speckled bush-cricket's body is the exact dappled green of the brambles it sits in.

Marginal habitats

Cave crickets (Rhaphidophoridae) live in caves and other dark, damp spaces. Many are blind, pale, and have enormously long legs and antennae — sensory adaptations for navigating in total darkness.

Ant-loving crickets (Myrmecophilinae) are tiny — 3–5 mm — and live inside ant nests, scavenging food and avoiding the ants by mimicking their chemical signatures.

A few species inhabit beaches, dunes, and even the marshy margins of estuaries.

08Senses

Crickets have all the standard insect senses — vision, smell, taste, touch — and a few unusual ones besides.

Hearing

The tympanal organs on the front legs (the "ear-knees") are tuned to a narrow band of frequencies, mostly the range of their own species' song. They're sensitive enough to pick up a singing male from tens of metres away. Females can also distinguish individual males' songs by tiny variations in tooth-strike rate, and tend to prefer males whose song shows them to be larger or older.

Vibration

Through the same legs, crickets feel substrate vibrations — footfalls, the pluck of grass, the bending of a twig. A foraging cricket can detect a heavy footstep from several metres away and freeze instantly.

Air-current sensing (cerci)

The two cerci on the abdomen are densely covered in microscopic hairs called filiform sensilla, each tuned to a slightly different airflow direction and frequency. Together they form a kind of biological radar that detects the air movement of an approaching predator — typically an attacking spider or wasp — and triggers a startle jump in roughly 30 milliseconds. That reflex is one of the fastest known in any animal.

Smell & taste

The antennae carry chemoreceptors used for both — crickets effectively "smell" their world by waving their antennae over surfaces. Taste receptors are also on the mouthparts and (in many species) the feet, meaning a cricket can tell whether a leaf is edible just by standing on it.

Vision

Compound eyes give a wide field of view but relatively low resolution. The three ocelli on the forehead don't form images at all — they detect changes in light intensity, useful for sensing dawn, dusk, and the shadow of a passing predator.

09Species you'll meet

Of the thousands of cricket species worldwide, a small handful do most of the singing in any given location. These are the ones a gardener, hiker, or back-doorstep listener is likeliest to meet.

Gryllus bimaculatus deserves a special mention — it's the laboratory rat of the cricket world. Most published research on cricket biology, neuroscience, and song production has used this species, mostly descended from a single population brought from Ishigaki Island, Japan to Hiroshima in the mid-20th century.

10The UK list

The UK is at the cold edge of the cricket world. Compared to the 700+ species found across continental Europe, Britain has roughly 30 native species of Orthoptera (crickets, bush-crickets, and grasshoppers combined). Of the true crickets and bush-crickets, the picture is currently:

11Predators & parasites

Crickets sit toward the bottom of many terrestrial food webs, and an enormous range of animals eat them. The list reads like a tour of a hedgerow:

Birds — robins, thrushes, blackbirds, owls, nightjars, and (in summer) swallows and swifts catching flying ones; raptors will take the larger species.

Mammals — hedgehogs, shrews, foxes, badgers, and bats (which detect crickets in flight by echolocation).

Reptiles & amphibians — lizards, slow-worms, frogs, toads, and newts will all snap up a cricket.

Other invertebrates — spiders, centipedes, predatory beetles, mantises, and hunting wasps. Several wasp species specialise in paralysing crickets to provision their nests.

Parasites

The most striking cricket parasite is the tachinid fly Ormia ochracea. The female fly homes in on a calling male cricket, lands on or near him, and deposits live larvae which burrow into his body. The larvae develop inside, eating him from the inside out, before emerging to pupate after about a week.

This has driven a remarkable bit of evolutionary pressure: in some Hawaiian populations of the field cricket Teleogryllus oceanicus, a mutation has appeared that prevents males from singing at all. They can't attract females the normal way, but they don't get eaten by parasitoid larvae either — and the silent males have spread through the population in just a few decades. Evolution caught in the act.

Another striking parasite is the horsehair worm (Nematomorpha). The worm matures inside a cricket's body cavity, then chemically manipulates the cricket into seeking water — usually a pond or stream — where the cricket effectively drowns itself, and the now-metre-long worm emerges to start the next stage of its lifecycle.

12Records & extremes

Largest

The bull cricket (Brachytrupes spp.) of Africa and Asia reaches around 5 cm in body length — the largest in family Gryllidae. Among broader cricket relatives, the great green bush-cricket (Tettigonia viridissima) reaches 7 cm in the UK; the giant weta (Deinacrida heteracantha) of New Zealand — technically a cricket relative, not a true cricket — can weigh over 70 grams and measure 10 cm.

Smallest

The ant-loving crickets (Myrmecophilinae) are the smallest at just 3–5 mm long, wingless, and almost invisible inside their host ants' nests.

Loudest

Mole crickets are unusually loud for their size — some species reach 96 dB measured at close range, comparable to a power saw. The acoustic horn formed by the burrow does most of the work; without it the same cricket would be far quieter.

Highest-pitched cricket relative

Some bush-crickets (Tettigoniidae) sing in the ultrasonic range — well above 20 kHz, beyond human hearing. The Arachnoscelis arachnoides of Colombia produces the highest-pitched insect call known, at around 150 kHz — three times higher than a bat's echolocation.

Fastest reflex

The startle response triggered by the cerci can fire a cricket into the air in around 30 milliseconds — among the fastest known reflexes in any animal.

Longest-lived in captivity

Indoor populations of Acheta domesticus have been reared for many decades in unbroken laboratory cultures. Individual lifespans remain short (weeks to months), but as a population the lineage is functionally immortal.

13In human culture

No insect has had a richer relationship with humans than the cricket. The most developed tradition is in China, which has roughly 2,000 years of cricket culture and three distinct phases.

Pre-Tang dynasty (before 618 AD): people kept crickets purely for their song, valuing the sound as a domestic music. Crickets were collected wild and brought into homes, especially as autumn approached.

Tang dynasty (618–907 AD): the practice became refined into a court tradition. Imperial concubines kept singing crickets in tiny gold cages and took them to bed at night to listen to their songs through the dark hours. Ordinary people copied the fashion. From this period onward, cricket cages became an art form — woven bamboo, carved gourd, ivory, jade — some of them now museum pieces.

Song dynasty (960–1279 AD): cricket fighting emerged as a major pastime. Two males of matched weight are placed in an arena and provoked to fight; matches are decided by who retreats first, not by injury (genuine fatalities are rare). Prime Minister Jia Sidao of the Southern Song wrote a how-to guide on cricket fighting; his obsession with the sport has been blamed for contributing to the empire's fall.

Cricket fighting was banned during China's Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) as a "bourgeois" pursuit, but has since revived. A contemporary champion fighting cricket can sell for thousands of yuan; the industry around them generates measurable revenue. Most fighting crickets today come from Shandong Province, traditionally regarded as producing the best stock.

In literature

Crickets appear throughout world literature, almost always as small, watchful, slightly melancholy presences:

Charles Dickens, The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) — a cricket as the spirit of a happy home.

Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883) — the Talking Cricket, a moral guide to a wayward puppet (later softened by Disney into Jiminy Cricket).

George Selden, The Cricket in Times Square (1960) — a Connecticut field cricket who stows away in a picnic basket and ends up in a New York subway station.

Tang dynasty poetry — countless poems use the cricket's autumn song as a metaphor for nostalgia, longing, and the passage of time. The cricket's seasonal nature made it a natural symbol for impermanence.

In folklore

A cricket on the hearth has been considered good luck across most of Europe for centuries — killing one is supposedly bad luck. In Brazilian folklore, a cricket changing colour predicts different things: brown means money, green means hope, black means illness. In Native American Cherokee tradition, the cricket is a teacher — an example of how to use voice and song.

14Crickets as food

Humans have eaten crickets for as long as humans have eaten anything. The practice (technically entomophagy) is documented in over 130 countries and is everyday food for an estimated 2 billion people — mostly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Crickets are nutritionally dense for their environmental cost. Per kilogram of edible mass, they contain roughly:

Production-wise, crickets convert feed to protein roughly 10× more efficiently than cattle, use a small fraction of the water, and produce negligible methane. A 2013 UN FAO report formally proposed insects as a sustainable protein source.

In commercial production, the species used is almost always Acheta domesticus (the house cricket), often dried and ground into "cricket flour" for protein bars, pasta, and baked goods. The flavour is mild and slightly nutty; the texture, when whole-roasted, is crunchy and similar to fried prawns.

15Conservation

Crickets, like most insects, are sensitive indicators of environmental change. Their distributions reflect habitat quality, climate, and pesticide use; their decline or expansion can reveal larger ecological shifts before more obvious indicators catch up.

Winners

Several UK and European cricket species are expanding their range northward, almost certainly due to climate warming. Roesel's bush-cricket in Britain is a textbook case — historically restricted to the Thames estuary and a few coastal sites, it has rapidly spread north and west since the 1990s. The species has both short-winged (flightless) and long-winged (flying) forms, and the long-winged form appears at the leading edge of the expansion, suggesting genuine colonisation rather than simple population growth.

Similar northward expansions are documented in Conocephalus bush-crickets, long-winged conehead, and several grasshopper species.

Losers

The same climate that helps generalists is hard on habitat specialists. The British field cricket needs warm, dry, short-grazed heath; the wart-biter needs species-rich chalk grassland; the mole cricket needs damp, undrained meadows. All three habitats have been heavily reduced by land-use change since the 18th century, and what's left is fragmented.

The pattern is general: cricket species that can live in mixed, scrubby, generalist habitats are doing well, while those tied to specific traditional landscape types are in trouble.

Conservation responses

UK conservation action for crickets includes:

Captive breeding and translocation — successfully used for Gryllus campestris and Decticus verrucivorus; a small mole cricket population is also under management.

Habitat restoration — heathland regeneration, traditional grazing reintroduction.

Legal protection — UK's mole cricket, field cricket, and wart-biter are on Schedule 5 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, making it illegal to kill, capture, or disturb them.

Recording schemes — the Orthoptera Recording Scheme run by Buglife and the iRecord platform let citizen naturalists upload sightings and song recordings.

16Identifying by song

Most crickets you'll meet are easier to identify by song than by sight — they're small, fast, and active at night. With practice you can distinguish the common species after a single hearing.

Listen for the rhythm. The single most useful question is: are the chirps discrete (separate, with gaps between) or continuous (a sustained buzz or trill)?

For ultrasonic species like speckled bush-crickets, a bat detector set to around 40 kHz makes them audible — bring one to a hedge on a warm August evening and you'll hear a previously invisible insect chorus.

17Myths & misconceptions

"Crickets rub their legs together to chirp." No — that's grasshoppers, who rub legs against wings. Crickets rub their wings against each other.

"All crickets sing." No — only males sing in the species that sing at all, and several species (the oak bush-cricket, for instance) don't sing at all and use other signals.

"You can hear a cricket from a mile away." Almost — some mole crickets really are audible from over a kilometre with the right wind. For most field crickets, 50 metres is more typical.

"Crickets only chirp at night." Mostly true for North American species, but several European bush-crickets (and the British field cricket) are daytime singers. The snowy tree cricket sings from dusk through the night.

"Crickets bring good luck." A cultural belief, not a biological fact, but the association is so widespread that crickets entering a home are considered welcome in folklore from China to Brazil to Britain.

"Crickets and locusts are the same thing." No — locusts are grasshoppers (Caelifera), not crickets (Ensifera). The two diverged hundreds of millions of years ago.

"You can tell exact temperature from any cricket." Only really true for the snowy tree cricket and a few similar species. Field crickets and bush-crickets give rough estimates at best.

"A house cricket is the same species as a field cricket." No — they're separate species in separate genera (Acheta vs Gryllus) that diverged a very long time ago. House crickets evolved alongside humans and our buildings.

18Glossary

Cerci

The pair of antenna-like sensors at the rear of the abdomen, used to detect air currents from behind.

Diapause

A pause in development, like animal hibernation but earlier in the lifecycle. Many cricket eggs diapause through winter.

Ectotherm

An animal whose body temperature follows its surroundings. All insects, including crickets, are ectotherms.

Ensifera

The "long-horned" suborder of Orthoptera — crickets, bush-crickets, katydids. Their antennae are longer than the body.

Gryllidae

The "true crickets" family — about 2,400 species. The narrowest definition of "cricket".

Hemimetabolous

Going through incomplete metamorphosis: egg → nymph → adult, with no pupa stage. Crickets are hemimetabolous.

Instar

A stage in nymph development between two moults. Crickets typically pass through 8–12 instars.

Mirror / Harp

The thin, drum-like region of the cricket's wing that resonates and amplifies the song.

Ocelli

Three simple, single-lens eyes on the forehead — they sense light intensity, not images.

Orthoptera

The order of insects containing crickets, grasshoppers, and locusts. Around 29,000 species.

Ovipositor

The long, needle-like egg-laying organ at the rear of female crickets. Easiest way to tell female from male.

Stridulation

Producing sound by rubbing two body parts together. Crickets stridulate by rubbing their forewings.

Synanthropic

Living in human-modified environments — like the house cricket's preference for buildings.

Tegmen / Tegmina

The hardened forewings (singular / plural). Used for singing, not flight.

Tympanal organ

The cricket's "ear" — a sensitive membrane on the front legs that detects sound.

Univoltine

Producing one generation per year. Most temperate crickets are univoltine.

19Quick questions

20Sources & further reading