A meadowhawk dragonfly, with dew on its wings, rests on a big sagebrush seedstalk Courtesy US FWS, Tom Koerner, PhotographerOur lovely fall cricket symphony finally went silent as temperatures dropped, an indicator that winter isn’t far off.
I must confess that I have a love/hate relationship with insects. Early years in Michigan exposed my tender flesh to a full suite of biters and stingers- black flies, deer flies, no-see-ums, gnats, horse flies, and clouds of mosquitos that would darken the sky! My dear farmer friend succumbed to a swarm of yellow jackets he angered while driving his tractor through a field, and I’m aware of insect vectors that inoculate us with wretched diseases- from the plague to malaria. Aside from this house of horrors, how often do we humans really appreciate these amazing beings?
Throughout history, insects have markedly shaped human culture—from serving as valuable sources of food, pigment, and fiber, to inspiring our greatest feats of engineering, art, and design. We have much to learn from their abundant wisdom.
They fuel life on Earth through their roles as pollinators, predators, and prey. Insects serve as foundational elements in almost every terrestrial environment, acting as both consumers and providers of essential services. Their presence ensures that energy flows efficiently through various trophic levels, supporting biodiversity from the smallest microorganisms to large vertebrates.
Hummingbird Moth and Monarch Butterfly on Showy Milkweed Courtesy US FWS, Tom Koerner, PhotographerAs pollinators, insects facilitate the reproduction of more than 75% of crop species and 85% of wild flowers. Many species provide natural biological control by preying on or parasitizing other insects that would otherwise destroy crops or local vegetation. Beyond their daily roles in nutrient cycling, insects act as guardians of environmental health. Their sensitivity to pollutants and habitat shifts makes them invaluable tools for assessing the overall resilience of natural landscapes.
Approximately 90 percent of bird species rely on insects for food at some point in their lives. Terrestrial birds that depend on insects have experienced a dramatic decline over the last 50 years. When insect availability drops, birds often struggle to meet the energy demands required for their daily survival and the strenuous needs of raising offspring.
Aerial insectivorous birds have seen a 32 percent population reduction since 1970, with groups like swifts, swallows and nightjars struggling as their primary food source vanishes. Because they rely almost exclusively on capturing insects in flight, they are uniquely sensitive to the health of the broader invertebrate community. Their inability to switch prey types effectively means that even short-term drops in insect activity can have catastrophic effects on nestling growth and adult survival.
Migratory birds face a compounded crisis from their breeding territories to their nonbreeding grounds and essential stopover points. Long distance species are particularly hard hit, as they often arrive after the short, critical peak in insect availability, leading to reproductive failure that residents and short-distance migrants avoid. Spring arrival dates often fail to align with the peak emergence of essential insect prey, a mismatch increasingly caused by shifting seasonal temperatures.
Industrial agriculture replacing vast swaths of biologically diverse natural systems with a few plant species and use of pesticides combined with extreme weather are primary causes in insect loss
This is Jack Greene for Bridgerland Audubon Society and I’m wild about Utah’s bugs, even the biting ones!
Richard Nelson and Mary Heers Inspecting Honeybee Hives Courtesy & Copyright Mary Heers, PhotographerIn the wild, a swarm of bees looking for a new home will often settle into a hollow in a tree. In some Cache Valley backyards, however. some bees will be quite content to move into a white 12×8 inch box sitting a few inches off the ground.
This is how my friend Richard got started keeping bees in his backyard with a single box full of worker honeybees and a queen.
Richard’s worker bees got busy building an interior wall of wax. This wall is an engineering marvel of tightly packed hexagonal cells that allow the bees to create the maximum amount of storage space with the minimum amount of wax.
While the interior walls were going up, other bees flew out of the bottom of the hive and into the flowering alfalfa fields nearby. The bees returned to the hive with bellies full of sugary nectar. The bees seemed to be thriving. Richard added another box.
Now, five years later, Richard has six hives and is harvesting gallons of honey. This year I invited myself over to watch the honey harvest.
We both suited up in bee suits. Richard lifted the top off one of the boxes. The bees were not pleased. The buzzing took on an angry edge as they flew right at us. I was very, very glad I was wearing the bee suit. I leaned in to get a better look and was surprised to see the bees had laid down a thin layer of wax capping the honey filled hexagonal cells. They had created a honey storage facility completely protected from moisture and air.
Bees are the only insect that produce wax. People that study bees tell us the honeybees secrete 8 tiny drops of wax out of their abdomen every 12 hours. The drops solidify into tiny flakes which the bees gather up. It takes 11,000 flakes to make 1 gram of wax. The bees keep the temperature inside the hive between 92-95 degrees Fahrenheit, so the wax stays flexible.
Later, when Richard got the harvested honey into his workshop, I watched him scrape off the layer of capping wax before putting the honey trays in the centrifuge. “Not to worry,” he said. He’d save the wax and make candles out of it later. Beeswax candles are ideal because they produce very little soot as well a few ions that help clean the air.
In 2013 the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris put 3 hives on their rooftop so they could make clean burning candles that could be lit inside the church.
Richard and I didn’t see the queen during the harvest, but Richard assured me she was there. Without a queen bee, the hive ceases to function. When Richard lost a queen awhile back, he quickly ordered one on the internet. The queen arrived in a small wood box (about the size of a matchbox) with a candy cork. It was up to the worker bees to open the box by chewing through the cork. Then, after the bees accepted the queen into their hive, they got to work feeding her an exclusive diet of Royal Jelly – something they produced out of their heads. In return the queen laid 1,500 eggs each day.
The queen becomes the mother of most if not all the bees in the hive. All the worker bees are female. Any drone lucky enough to mate with a virgin queen drops dead immediately afterwards. It’s a matriarchal society all the way.
I wonder if Brigham Young and the early pioneers knew this when they put the bee on the Utah flag in 1847.
Jerusalem Cricket (Orthoptera: Stenopelmatidae) Courtesy & Copyright Marty Reeder, Photographer“Dad, what kind of bug is this?”
Normally, I try not to get distracted when going up as steep an incline as the Wellsville Mountains—stopping and starting again is as much work as slowly plodding on—but, I decided that a side quest to look at a bug might give me an excuse for a much-needed breather. Besides, I probably did the same when my dad took my siblings and me with him on hikes up the Wellsvilles when we were little. He sure loved those mountains, and the long hike gave him an excuse to dispense little morsels of life wisdom along the way.
When I approached the spot the kids were huddled, I was expecting to supply some wisdom myself on this bug.
A second later, I stood perplexed. I was looking at an insect I had never seen before. The bug was the size of my thumb and shifted awkwardly in what little dirt could be found just below the bare ridge of the Wellsvilles. Its dark abdomen was covered in scaled layers that became light on the edges, making it look something like the stripes of a bee. Unlike a bee, it had no stinger or wings. Its head was the size of a small cherry, with the color similar—an off-red or even orange. The six yellow, almost translucent, legs were hefty enough to support the massive body.
The kids repeated their question. My first instinct, thanks to the tones of red and orange and never seeing anything like it before, made me want to quip that it was clearly from Mars. I checked myself when thinking how this comment would compare to the boundless wisdom of my dad. In a moment of rare restraint, I told them that I had no idea and would have to research it. I snapped a photo, and we continued our march.
After surviving the Wellsvilles, I searched and discovered that we had observed a Jerusalem Cricket. Information on these insects is almost as scarce as a cricket sighting itself, so I decided to talk to someone with more experience.
Doctor James Pitt, an entomologist at Utah State who studies mathematical population models of various insect species, assured me that not only is the Jerusalem Cricket not from Jerusalem, it’s not even a cricket. Maybe my Martian bug idea was not too far off!
And while I thought its large and exotic, bee-like appearance signified danger, Dr. Pitt said that it was probably harmless unless provoked into a bite. I gathered from him that it was not prone to the large scale booms and busts of other locust-type insects—it was not even of the same family as those swarming pests. Instead, this is a bug that lives fairly solitary life cycles, mainly staying underground and only coming up occasionally. It seems as though our daytime sighting, and up in this high mountain environment of rocks and little vegetation, was somewhat rare. How did that cricket end up in such a place?
I decided to keep researching. Facts about females cannibalizing the males after mating or being known for feeding on potatoes did little to explain its presence on this high point (unless we were looking at a male determined to live a hermit-like bachelor life?). Besides, there were no potatoes on the Wellsvilles, and even the potato farmers I talked to were just as curious about this insect as I was. Chalk up another tally for Martian origins!
Still, I was not ready to give up. The more I learned, the more clear it was that, as foreign as the Jerusalem Cricket was to our modern heritage, some cultures with deeper roots in the region are much more familiar with it. Native Americans, ranging from the Yuma to the Navajo to the Hopi all included legends associated with the Jerusalem Cricket. I realized that my ignorance of them might have had more to do with what one article mentioned: urban development and roads tend to hamper these soil-burrowing and wingless bugs more than other, more mobile insects, limiting their range and visibility to people like us.
Thinking back to the moment my kids and I crowded around the Jerusalem Cricket, I started to feel as if the alien nature of this close encounter had more to do with us than the cricket. Perhaps we had something to learn from this subtle but persevering veteran of the West.
While learning about the Jerusalem Cricket helped provide me with this important perspective, it still did not reveal the mystery of what this particular cricket was doing way up on the Wellsville Mountain Range.
I just about gave up on making sense of the cricket’s location—hadn’t I learned enough by now? However, I thought I would read one more academic work before wrapping up. I discovered that the Hopi created figurines and masks of the Jerusalem Cricket for rituals, and they equated it with certain human-like traits. To them, the cricket represented human runners or racers, particularly over long distances. This was more in relation to their ceremonies, since Jerusalem Crickets barely achieve more than a crawl at the best of times, but the comparison stuck out strongly to me.
My mind went back to the Wellsvilles Ridge. I remembered that, when I was still very young, my dad participated in a Wellsville Ridge Race—a long distance run that went from one end of the Wellsvilles to the other. He would later go on to be the Cross Country Coach at Utah State for decades and just before he passed away over ten years ago, Utah State named their distance course after him and my mom: The Steve & Dona Reeder Cross Country Course. He is a distance running icon.
What was the Jerusalem Cricket doing up there? Something in me now thinks that perhaps the Wellsvilles are a place where distance runners go to dispense wisdom and perspective. I am glad that on the high slopes of the Wellsville Mountains, I got to have one of those runners give me wisdom for living life respectfully and responsibly. And I am glad to later meet another “runner” that offered perspective on the long legacy and hardy endurance of the wildlife that surrounds us.
I am Marty Reeder and my kids and I, and I’d like to think my dad, are all Wild About Utah.
Credits:
Image: Courtesy and Copyright Marty Reeder, Photographer
Featured Audio: Courtesy and Copyright Anderson, Howe, and Wakeman
Text: Marty Reeder, https://skyview.ccsdut.org/
Additional Reading: Marty Reeder and Lyle Bingham, https://bridgerlandaudubon.org/
Stoffolano, John G., Jr., and Barton Wright. “Sösööpa—Jerusalem Cricket: An Important Insect in the Hopi Katsina Pantheon.” American Entomologist 51, no. 3 (2005): 174–79. https://doi.org/10.1093/ae/51.3.174.
Weissman, David B. “JERUSALEM! CRICKET? (Orthoptera: Stenopelmatidae: Stenopelmatus); Origins of a Common Name.” American Entomologist 51, no. 3 (2005): 138–139. https://doi.org/10.1093/ae/51.3.138.
Quagga Mussels Exposed at Lake Powell Courtesy & Copyright Utah Division of Wildlife Resources, Phil Tuttle, PhotographerYou’ve heard the phrases, “Don’t move a mussel,” (spelled m-u-s-s-e-l) and “Stop aquatic hitch hikers.” If you have ever transported a watercraft, ranging in size from a paddle board to wake surf boat, you’ve probably been annoyed by the inconvenience of stopping at mandatory boat check stations for invasive species watercraft inspections. The threat is real and I hope this segment will make you a believer in inspection stations.
Let’s backtrack.
The opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959 allowed cargo ships to bypass the rapids on the St. Lawrence River and enter Lake Ontario. From there ships could access Canada’s Welland Canal, which also uses a series of locks to allow ships and barges to bypass Niagara Falls and access the rest of the Great Lakes. Proponents of the St. Lawrence Seaway sold the project on the grounds that it would turn the Great Lakes into a North American “Mediterranean” by transforming cities from Rochester, New York to Duluth, Minnesota into global ports.
They got what they wished for, but with a twist. “Salties,” or oceangoing cargo ships, traveling from the Mediterranean, Black, and Caspian Seas, emptied their ballast tanks in Great Lakes ports as cargo was loaded. In June of 1988 the first documented zebra mussel was found in Lake St. Clair—a small lake (in comparison to the Great Lakes) where the St. Clair River pools about halfway along its journey from Lake Huron to Lake Eire. This single, fingernail-sized mussel signaled a catastrophe. By the end of 1989, invasive zebra and quagga mussels were found in all five Great Lakes.
Zebra Mussel (Dreissena polymorpha) vs Quagga Mussel (Dreissena rostriformis bugensis). Courtesy USGS, Wetland and Aquatic Research Center, Amy J Benson, PhotographerZebra and quagga mussels are mollusks—soft-bodied invertebrates housed in hinged, two-part shells. They contain a muscular “foot” that allows them to move twelve to fourteen inches per hour—but that’s not how they travel most efficiently. Zebra and quagga mussels can produce a million eggs per year, that hatch into microscopic “veligers” which can swim efficiently for several weeks before their shell begins to form, sinking them to the bottom. Once a mature zebra mussel finds a suitable place for a home, the foot forms an epoxy-like bond with hard surfaces, making them difficult and expensive to remove from ship hulls, water intake pipes, docks, locks, and hydro-electric power infrastructure.
Zebra mussels thrive in water less than about fifty feet deep and on hard surfaces. Quagga mussels thrive in soft lake bottoms in water as deep as 500 feet. Together these invasive mollusks wreak havoc on aquatic ecosystems where they are most vulnerable—the bottom of the food chain.
Razor sharp zebra and quagga mussels filter microscopic nutrients from the water, This makes lakes clearer, while stripping them of nutrients aquatic species depend upon. By 2009 phytoplankton levels in the Great Lakes were diminished by 90% compared to pre-mussel levels. Clearer water makes for easier fishing for predatory birds and clearer water allows sunlight to penetrate deeper into lakes, warming them up faster and creating prime conditions for toxic algae blooms. Algae blooms deplete the water of oxygen and create ideal conditions for botulism, which then causes massive waterfowl die-offs. All of this has happened in the Great Lakes in a viscous cycle set in motion by zebra and quagga mussels.
Invasive mussels were found in Lake Mead in 2007 and in Lake Powell in 2013—transported from the Midwest recreational boats. What has happened in the Great Lakes can—and is—happening in the west.
Pristine waters that could be harmed by Aquatic Invasive Species Courtesy & Copyright Eric Newell, PhotographerSo, the next time you have to wait in line at a boat-check station, know you are doing the right thing. Clean, drain, and dry your paddle boards, kayaks, whitewater rafts, fishing boats, and wake surfers before transporting them to other waterways and lakes. It only takes one contaminated watercraft to put the rest of the lakes and rivers that we all love in peril.
I am Eric Newell and I am wild about Utah’s lakes and rivers.
Credits:
Images: Quagga Mussels exposed at Lake Powell, Phil Tuttle, Photographer, Utah DWR
Boating, Eric Newell, Photographer
Featured Audio: Courtesy & Copyright J. Chase and K.W. Baldwin.
Text: Eric Newell, Edith Bowen Laboratory School, Utah State University & Lyle Bingham, Bridgerland Audubon Society
