Aaron Eagar with the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food in the plant industry division says warm temperatures and low precipitation may make this year's Mormon Cricket hatch larger than hatches in years past.
“Because we had a dry winter and we're in a drought.” Eagar explained, “those are two indicators that we might have hatching happen early.”
Eagar said the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food is proactively surveying for Mormon Crickets in an effort to mitigate negative effects.
“We had our people go out and we started doing surveys probably a month, maybe even 45 days earlier than typical.” Eagar said the extra effort was a good call. “And we started to see some initial hatchings of the Mormon crickets.”
In addition to ideal conditions, Eagar said that he and his team have more reasons to believe this year might be prolific for Mormon Cricket hatches.
“Mormon crickets are eight-year cycles," Edgar said. "We kind of anticipated that we'd be in an up cycle for the last three years. Last year we seen the populations go down. So, we're not quite sure. It's really hard to gauge what this year is going to hold.”
While Mormon Crickets play an essential role in Utah ecosystems, providing high protein food to birds and small rodents, Eagar said that in large numbers, anything over 10 crickets per square yard, can cause significant damage to agriculture.
“We've seen populations in the 40s, 50 per square yard.” Eagar said, thinking back to the Mormon Cricket hatch two years ago. “You can walk through and do the numbers. An adult grasshopper is about 300 grams. They eat about .01 grams a day. But then as they're eating, they're cutting leaves, and some of those leaves fall, so the total damage is .02. If you run the numbers on that you're doing about 5 to 600 pounds that they can eat every day. Having a pest like that come through, it can be really financially devastating to our producers.”
There are, however, important ways the public can help, namely by being vigilant, Eagar said.
“We don't know what it's going to be like this year," Edgar said. "We don't know if it's going to explode or not. And the more eyes we can put on the ground, and the more people can see something, notify us, the better.”
If you see Mormon crickets, snap a picture and email it to the Utah Department of Agriculture with a detailed description of where it was found.