The mole crickets name is derived from their appearance resembling a mole, and underground habitsMole Crickets Their name is derived from their appearance resembling a mole, and underground habits. The anatomy of Mole crickets is designed for an athlete—a pair of forelimbs with spade-like dactyls built for shoveling, burrowing and swimming. Commonly in light brown hue, the back of their body is equipped with wings that enable them to reach destinations in 8 kilometers per hour. With an exception of Antarctica, these winged insects are found virtually in every continent. When it is not hibernating in winter, this cricket is a hyper thick-bodied insect infesting almost anything that favors its eyes and appetite—larvae, worms, roots and grasses. When satiating on plants, they feed on seeds, tillers in mature plants, and bases and stands of plants. The havoc they wreak includes golf courses, vegetable and flower gardens. Their diet consists of grubs, tomatoes, sweet peppers, eggplants, potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, cabbage, peanuts and tobacco seedlings. They are relatively common. In some States, they are known as lawn crickets, and flying moles. Growers of vegetables and flower garden are particularly annoyed by mole crickets as they see them drowned in swimming pools, and covered their lawns. The mature crickets are endowed with wings which afford them nocturnal flights to anywhere where there are lights, as they are at times, drawn to them. Nonetheless, not all varieties of these insects have the privilege of such feat. Some species have reduced hind wings particularly in males, while others are wingless. Throughout their life cycles, they busy themselves in constructions which consist primarily of 20-feet tunnels beneath the ground, and similar traces above it, vertical burrows for their shelter, and long galleries that can truly disintegrates roots and kill the grass. While most of them gather food from the surface to their hideouts, the males sing at the entrances of their vertical burrows, which are particularly designed to amplify their songs. The singing, distinctly deeper than the typical crickets and attributed to frogs by people, commences at dusk, often after rain, and lasts for a few hours. The female American crickets are believed to lay and deposit their eggs in the chambers in their burrows, and guard them heavily. Upon hatching, the larval nymph is a small version of an adult mole cricket without the wings. In the next few weeks, it feeds and molts as it grows until it reaches the adult stage in the fall season or in winter. As part of their defense mechanism, their hind end produces a clear and viscid substance to entangle spider and other potential insect predators. This page listed under Lawn Care Tips |