You are no doubt less familiar with mole crickets than their cousins the field crickets or house crickets. That’s because mole crickets spend a good deal of time underground.
Texas Standard’s go-to insect expert, Texas A&M program specialist Wizzie Brown, says mole crickets may just look on first glance like a “clunky cricket” but that they are worth knowing about both because they have some unique qualities – and because they can be damaging to your yard.
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Look at those legs!
All insects have six legs, but each pair of legs on a mole cricket are different.
“The front pair of legs are what we call fossorial, and they are actually for digging,” Brown said. “The middle legs are called ambulatorial, and they’re for walking. And then, since they’re a cricket and they’re an orthoptera, the hind legs are saltatorial, which means they are specialized for jumping.”
Brown says mole crickets are the only insects she knows of with three different kinds of legs. Especially interesting are those front legs, “because they look like little tiny paws and they use them to dig through the soil which is really cool,” Brown said.
Why they’re pests
It’s cool that they dig – unless they’re digging up your yard in a way that you don’t like.
“Most people don’t like mole crickets because they can cause damage to turf,” Brown said.
Texas is home to two types of “pest” mole crickets. The tawny mole cricket is found in the southeastern part of the state around Houston and Beaumont. The southern mole cricket is more widespread.
“The tawny mole crickets are going to actually cause damage in two ways,” Brown said. “They feed on grass roots, so that can cause damage, and then they also can damage through tunneling.”
The southern mole crickets feed on other insects as well as some plant material but do their primary damage when they come to the surface.
Both types – but especially the southern mole cricket – “come up the surface at night to feed, and when they’re tunneling through there, that’s causing major damage because it’s pushing up the turf and you get these little … kind of like worm-like tunnels that you see going through the turf, and people don’t like that,” Brown said.
Managing mole crickets
Most of the damage with mole crickets is going to occur in the late summer to early fall. And they are going to be damaging in both their immature stages and the adult stages.
“So their immatures, or nymphs, are going look very similar to the adults, but they’re just smaller and they don’t have fully developed wings,” Brown said.
Mole crickets spend most of their time underneath the ground, especially during the day. But, Brown said, if you are out at night, you might see them.
“If you suspect that you have mole crickets … you can take a bucket of soapy water and dump it over the area, and that soap is going to irritate the exoskeleton, and that can drive them to the surface so you can see what you’re dealing with,” Brown said.
If you want get rid of them, Brown suggests you can call a professional or do it yourself with a turf product from the store.
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