2. How Different Crickets Live at Different Heights
Tree crickets live up off the ground. In the Missouri guide's words, they live "in trees, bushes, and tall herbaceous plants at least a foot or so above the ground." Many use shrubs or tall plants such as goldenrod, grasses and thistles rather than trees, and each species tends to favor a particular plant and height. The two-spotted tree cricket stays high in the trees almost all the time.[1]
Field crickets are different. The fall field cricket, a common species across much of the United States, is recorded in cracks, under objects, in grassy vegetated areas and in clay badlands.[3] The spring field cricket is listed in areas with more vegetation, around watercourses, and on sandy or loam surfaces.[4] That long list suggests that both species can live in a range of places.
Different kinds of crickets have been recorded in different places: some near the ground, some higher up, and some in damper or drier spots. The sources I read list where each kind has been recorded, but they do not measure how kinds divide a single meadow, so I will not claim more than that.
3. Why Britain's Field Cricket Lives in a Burrow in Sunny Turf
In Britain, the field cricket (Gryllus campestris) digs a burrow. RSPB conservationists (the RSPB is a UK wildlife charity) describe how it comes out in spring to sunbathe at the entrance, because it must warm up before it can feed, and how it makes a small spoon-shaped "sun lounger" in short vegetation.[5] Wikipedia adds that males dig a burrow with a platform at the entrance and sing to attract females from it, though I did not find that in a second source.[6]
This cricket shows why the right habitat matters. It declined severely as the heathland it needs disappeared, and by the early 1990s only one colony of about 100 individuals was left in the UK. It cannot fly, so it cannot easily move to new places. The RSPB and partners moved crickets to newly created heathland at Farnham Heath in Surrey and Pulborough Brooks in West Sussex.[5] A cricket that lives in a burrow in warm, short turf cannot simply move next door when the turf is gone.
4. How Crickets Survive Winter Where They Live
Where a cricket lives is not only about the season it sings. It also depends on what form it is in when the cold comes, and this differs between kinds.
- The fall field cricket spends the winter as eggs. It has one generation a year, and the first adults appear in late July or early August.[3]
- The spring field cricket spends the winter as late-stage nymphs (young crickets that have not yet grown wings and finished growing), and the adults appear in mid to late spring.[4]
- Snowy tree crickets, like other tree crickets, lay their eggs inside plant stems. The eggs make it through the winter and hatch in late spring or early summer.[1]
- Britain's field cricket reportedly spends the winter as a half-grown nymph in its burrow.[6]
For a cricket, then, the "home" in winter may be a burrow, a stem or the soil. The adult you hear in autumn is only one stage of a longer story.
5. How a Cricket Can Live Inside an Ant Nest
Some crickets live in the most dangerous place you could imagine: inside an ant colony. The checklist of North American crickets includes five species of ant crickets in the genus Myrmecophilus.[2] Ants usually attack intruders, so how do these crickets survive?
A team at Nagoya University in Japan, led by Ryoya Tanaka, studied the ant cricket Myrmecophilus tetramorii and published the results in the journal Communications Biology. This cricket lives in a host colony and feeds on dead insects and ant larvae. The team found that its escapes mostly fall into two types.[7][8]
- Distancing: the cricket simply moves directly away from an approaching ant, a quick reaction to an attack that is about to happen.
- Dodging: the cricket circles around the ant, ending up behind it and farther from its jaws. This is slower and keeps the cricket farther from the host. Most escapes from host ants used dodging.[7]
The researchers suggest that dodging helps the cricket stay in corners and other spots in the nest while avoiding the ants.[7] So a cricket's habitat is sometimes not a place on the ground at all, but a place among other animals, and living there takes special moves.
6. How to Look for Where Crickets Live Near You
You can try this with an adult on a warm evening. Choose two safe spots you can visit with an adult, such as a short, mowed patch and a patch with taller plants or a shrub. A park or a quiet path works as well as a yard. Sit still and listen at each one for a few minutes, and write down which spot the sound came from and roughly how high up it seemed to be. If you want to look, shine a flashlight gently from a few steps away and let your eyes search the base of the plants.
Stay on public paths or your own yard, and do not enter private land. Do not reach into thick grass or under objects with your bare hands, since you cannot see what else is there. If you find nothing, that is still an answer, and it is the same answer as the one in this article: crickets are good at staying out of sight.
For a place to read more, the singing insects pages of the Orthopterists' Society (listed below) show where each North American species has been recorded.