‘Worst I have ever seen it’: Mormon crickets march on northern Nevada town
ELKO, Nevada (ABC4) — It’s a sign of spring in the high desert: Swarms of Mormon crickets marching across northern Nevada.
Videos posted on TikTok this week show thousands of the critters swarming store fronts, marching over fields and getting run over at intersections in Spring Creek, Nevada. The town is about 10 miles southeast of Elko.
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Gary Doherty, who’s lived in Spring Creek for the last 30 years, said that over the weekend the side of his house was completely covered in a thick, dark layer of twitching bugs.
“You couldn’t even open up the door or else you’d be flooded with crickets,” he said.
Doherty spent an hour trying to clear his front door, blowing the bugs away with a Shop-Vac. But his efforts hardly made a dent.
While he’d seen Mormon crickets in the area through the years, he’d never seen so many up close at his home before.
“It is freaky. It is nerve-racking,” he said.
Kelsey Merchant, the owner of the Petal Merchant on Spring Creek Parkway, said that bugs are a serious disruption to her business.
“A flower shop has a certain aesthetic that doesn’t involve crickets being all over the building, jumping everywhere,” she said.
Merchant removed all the plants from outside her store for fear that they’d be eaten by the voracious pests.
“This is the worst I have ever seen it since living here,” Merchant said, adding that she moved to Spring Creek six years ago.
Mormon crickets are native to Nevada and Utah. Every 20 years or so, there’s a large population boom that can sometimes lead to problems.
Kristopher Watson, a state entomologist with the Utah Department of Agriculture, said that when the bugs “band up” in large numbers they can damage crops.
However, he noted that they aren’t as devastating to vegetation as grasshoppers, as the Mormon crickets tend to move across the landscape with a “soldier-like” efficiency.
“This week they’re a problem, and next week it’s hard to even find them,” Watson said.
In Utah, there have been recent reports of Mormon crickets in Box Elder and Uintah counties. They tend to stick to rangeland, outside the Wasatch Front.
The creatures get their name from the settlers and pioneers who encountered them while traveling through Utah. They play a prominent role in the “Miracle of the Gulls” legend.
Their name is also a misnomer. While the bugs resemble and sound like crickets, they’re actually shield-back katydids.
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