The small town of Elko in rural northeastern Nevada is being invaded by a swarm of blood-red crickets.
Dana Dolan was driving through her small Nevada hometown when she thought she had come upon a gory crash. The ground surrounding Elko's stretch of Interstate 80 looked as if it had been covered in blood. As the red color shifted and moved, she realized instead it was an infiltration of crickets, some bigger than her thumb.
The invasion of the cannibalistic crickets has hit especially hard in Elko, a small town of about 20,000 near Idaho and Utah known for its gold mining. The red creatures blanket highways and scuttle over barriers, seeking food. They crackle and pop under the wheels of trucks, creating something like an oil slick, said Jeremiah Moore of Spring Creek, whose vehicle slid off the road after a highway encounter with the Mormon crickets.
"We're just trying to keep them moving on their way," said Steve Burrows, a spokesperson for Northeastern Nevada Regional Hospital.There was the medical worker in the cardiology unit who, still in his black scrubs, went outside the hospital's ambulance bay between seeing patients to swat crickets away with a broom, Burrows said. And the IT specialists who helped with clean-up efforts.
"The settlers prayed for relief," Knight said. "That came in the form of seagulls. Seagulls ate the crickets...That's also why they're the state bird of Utah." Each spring - or summer, in this case - the crickets born that year will mate and lay a new generation of eggs in the soil. Those eggs are meant to hatch the following spring, but some will lay dormant in the soil for up to 11 years, Knight said. Eggs can accumulate in the dirt for years until a drought comes along, triggering the sleepy eggs to hatch all at once. And then the cycle repeats.
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