ELKO, Nevada – Dana Dolan was driving through her small Nevada hometown when she thought she had met with a bloody accident. The ground surrounding the Elko stretch of Interstate 80 looked as if it had been covered in blood. When the red color changed and moved, she realized it was an infiltration of crickets, some larger than her thumb.
“It’s almost like a biblical plague,” Dolan told The Associated Press last week, laughing at the absurdity of the situation unfolding in Elko, where he has lived for six years.
Tens of thousands of Mormon cricket eggs buried an inch deep in the ground began to hatch in late May and early June. For weeks, the red bugs have been invading swaths of northern Nevada and causing chaos, said state entomologist Jeff Knight.
They are in the streets, plants and houses of Elko, a community in Nevada.
The cannibalistic cricket invasion has hit Elko the hardest, a small town of about 20,000 near Idaho and Utah known for its gold mining.
The big red bugs leave behind such a horrible stench, similar to burnt meat, that it forces residents to hold their noses while driving. Animals stick to tires and the soles of shoes, and their carcasses are everywhere, even in gyms. When they move, it sounds like rain, Dolan says.
Residents and workers have tried using brooms, leaf blowers, pressure washers, and snow blowers to get rid of the crickets, only to have them return. State officials have erected signs throughout Elko County warning drivers about slippery roads, a hangout for bugs that won’t think twice about eating their dead friends.
The red creatures cover the roads and jump over the barriers in search of food. They crackle and burst under the wheels of trucks, creating something like an oil slick, said Jeremiah Moore of Spring Creek, whose vehicle veered off the road after an encounter with Mormon crickets.
“I…was coming home and when I turned the corner, I went a little too fast and almost ended up in the ditch full of water,” Moore said. “It was pretty intense,” he added.
One hospital even hired four temporary part-time employees whose primary task was to clear the campus of crickets long enough for patients to enter the building. The group called themselves the Cricket Patrol.
“We’re just trying to keep them moving,” said Steve Burrows, a spokesman for Northeast Nevada Regional Hospital.
When the Cricket Patrol was not on duty, Burrows said, other hospital employees intervened.
A medical worker in the cardiology unit, still wearing his black scrubs, went out to the hospital’s ambulance bay between seeing patients to brush away crickets with a broom, Burrows said. And IT specialists helped with the cleanup efforts.
Native to the Great Basin and Intermountain West, outbreaks of Mormon crickets have been recorded throughout history throughout the West, from Nevada and Montana to Idaho, Utah and Oregon. There are records of infestations dating back to the 1930s, according to entomologist Knight.
Legend has it that the bugs got their name when they began ravaging crops planted by Mormon settlers who had moved to Utah’s Salt Lake Valley, Knight said.
“The settlers prayed for relief,” Knight said. “That came in the form of seagulls. The seagulls ate the crickets… That’s why they’re also the state bird of Utah,” he added.
In Oregon, state legislators in recent years have allocated millions of dollars to assess the problem and establish a “suppression” program for Mormon crickets and grasshoppers.
The Mormon cricket is not a true cricket, but a shield-wielding grasshopper. They don’t fly, but they travel together in “bands” that can range in size from five to hundreds of acres, Knight said.
However, the invasion in Elko this year is unprecedented in its size, if not in its timing.
The crickets hatched much later than usual in the spring, delayed by an especially wet season and snow-filled winter in northern Nevada, Knight said.
Every spring, or summer, in this case, the crickets hatched that year will mate and lay a new generation of eggs in the ground. Those eggs are meant to hatch the following spring, but some will lie dormant in the soil for up to 11 years, Knight explained. The eggs can accumulate in the soil for years until a drought hits, causing the sleepy eggs to hatch all at once. And then the cycle repeats itself.
In his nearly 40 years working for the Nevada Department of Agriculture, 32 of them as a state entomologist, Knight said he can recall four invasions. The infestation in the early 2000s “was more impressive in my mind, looking at the general extent,” he said.
Knight remembers once driving from Reno to Utah on Interstate 80 and being surrounded by a red swarm for most of the way.
“Then we can go almost 10 or 15 years without hardly seeing any,” Knight said of the crickets. “From about 2008, we hardly had any crickets, until about 2019,” she said.
Elko’s new red residents won’t move in until at least mid-August, much to everyone’s despair.
But where do the crickets go when they leave?
They die, Knight said. Male crickets after mating. Female crickets after laying their eggs.
