This summer, I’m investigating the behavioral ecology of Anabrus simplex, also known, perhaps regrettably, as the Mormon cricket*. Locally, I’ve become known as “The Cricket Lady” and, more dubiously, “The Bug Gut Drifter,” thanks to an experiment involving a slick of hemolymph and my truck during a rainstorm. (A story for another post.) And if you think the field work juice is worth the squeeze, follow my professional Instagram @talkingcrickets.
” Crickets Next 60 Miles Use Caution” – Li posing next to her (sort of) trusty truck in front of an NDOT announcement.
Swarms Like Spilled Ink
In the high desert, these katydids swarm like spilled ink or, as one Shanty Town, Nevada resident put it, “a bubbling up of red lava with legs.” They cascade down roads and hillsides in waves of clicking bodies that are hard to ignore and harder to predict.
The question I hear most often is: Why do they move like that? Is there a leader? Panic? Purpose?
No one fully knows. That ambiguity, a fun mixture of instinct, perception, and environmental response, is the crux of my work.
Li often has many crickets crawling all over her when she is doing data collection. She has found them many times in her pillow case as she curls up for sleep in the back of her truck. Special thanks to David Parker for use of his FAA-registered drone and pilot skills.
Science Fiction Meets Dust and Duct Tape
To investigate these movement dynamics, I’ve teamed up with folks from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, Texas A&M Entomology, and engineers at the University of Washington. Together, we’re piloting a method that almost seems part science fiction and part dirt-under-the-nails fieldwork: we track thousands of crickets that are outfitting with fingernails-sized, ultra-light cameras from 45 feet above using 4K drones to approximate their visual perspective. These 700 mg Bluetooth cameras, originally developed to study Vespa mandarinia, the infamous “murder hornet,” are now delicately glued to katydid exoskeletons in the dust and heat of Nevada. The feed is clunky and limited, but it offers something rare: a pseudo-first-person view of cricket navigation through sagebrush, cheatgrass, shadow, and crucially, other crickets.
Mormon crickets have been mounted with radio transmitters in other tracking experiments, and a tiny Bluetooth camera developed by scientists at the University of Washington, is on loan to help provide new cricket-perspective footage of their movement. (Iyer, V., Najafi, A., James, J., Fuller, S., & Gollakota, S. (2020). Wireless steerable vision for live insects and insect-scale robots. Science Robotics, 5(44).) Special thanks to Dr. Vikram Iyer and Dr. Sawyer Fuller.
I crawl on my belly to attach these devices, trying not to lose track of gear that cost more than my truck. To some pest control officers and colleagues, my methods are “quirky.” To me, getting down to the insect’s level is essential. What I usually feel, though, is that it’s friggin hot.
Mormon crickets are often studied as pests, but our team approaches them as ecosystem indicators and behavioral enigmas. This project combines high-resolution field observation, imaging, and computer modeling to understand how collective movement emerges—and what it might reveal about land use, climate shifts, and more-than-human decision-making.
Tiny Tech, Giant Questions
While most of my summer has been in and around Elko County, we also ran a weeklong “data sprint” in Dinosaur, Colorado. Max Planck and Texas A&M shipped VR gear to Brontosaurus Boulevard. The team reassembled virtual reality machines they built for field-tests on Mormon crickets. Our lab was a single-wide motel trailer. We scouted for marching cricket bands within a two-hour radius and deployed the field VR machines using solar panels to power the whole system.
These rigs isolate visual cues, things like the movement of neighbor crickets and optical flow, to test what triggers behaviors like turning, pausing, or following. This follows research done by the team on Schistocerca gregaria (the desert locust). Is swarm movement mimicry? Or is it cognitive convergence with each cricket deciding individually, but in rhythmic alignment?
My collaborators returned to their labs, but I stayed in the field, continuing to gather supplemental data and run field tests. All data collected through this project will be shared with local landowners, Tribal partners where applicable, and regional land managers—with the goal of co-developing more responsive, ecologically-informed approaches to rangeland health.
Li with the field Mormon cricket VR machine developed by the scientists pictured, Dr. Sercan Sayin, Dr. Gregory Sword, and Dr. Pavan Kaushik (not pictured is Dr. Vishwanath Varna). It ran on portable solar panels. A video of the whole setup is below.
Fieldwork Is a Team Sport
Even the solitary weird bug girl life needs company. The nicheness of insect science still doesn’t mean it unfolds in a vacuum. Doing fieldwork requires hacking the rest of your life to match. Logistics out in the remote parts of Nevada would be impossible without my childhood friend David Parker.
David and I grew up in Pocatello, Idaho. Now he builds barns around Elko, Nevada, and knows everyone from the feed store to the tribal council. He’s the kind of person who can get you both into and out of the hairiest pickles in the jar.
Thanks to David, I’ve been introduced to ranchers who hand me jars of dilly beans and elderberry jam, who walk me through their trapping sheds and elk mounts. David also happens to be a paraglider and pilot. He reads the sky. I read the ground. Together, we caravan toward rumors of “gross cricket slicks,” then split: he launches from a ridge while I kneel in the dust.
My childhood friend David is a paraglider who lives in Elko. We have developed a symbiotic relationship. He reads the wind and four-wheel drives me out to field sites, and I pick up crickets and him up after he flies.
By sunset, we reconvene. His truck has 4WD and gets us through the washouts. Mine’s 2WD but hauls buckets of crickets, camera gear, and a cooler of kimchi and instant noodles I cook at night.
Field meal cooked off a tailgate tastes the best.
What the Crickets Might Be Telling Us
What I love about this work with crickets is how it refuses to sit still and how it changes with the wind. One moment I’m testing diet preferences on the side of the road; the next, I’m talking rangeland ethics with ranchers or digging into the history of pest control in the West at the 24-hour bars along the railroad in Elko.
Mormon crickets, for all their noise and nuisance, might be ecological messengers that can help us trace drought lines, surface landscape fractures, and interpret environmental signals long before institutions catch up. I met a farmer who was frustrated by government responses to crop infestations and how it will impact his alfalfa harvest and while we bellyached about crickets together, we became buddies. We eventually swapped stories about divorcing our first wives and built a rapport that I hope continues far into the future.
These interactions and many others I’ve had can show me what happens when we stop trying to control or focus solely the human-nature conflicts we may or may not have created and instead ask: How are these non-human harbingers and disasters training us to get along with other humans and plan for an uncertain future together?
Reading cricket swarms is like reading clouds. You learn to look slantwise. To feel for shifts before they declare themselves. The trick isn’t knowing everything. It’s being willing to be surprised. To wait. To crawl closer. To be crawled on. To pay attention to the temperature of the morning, the direction of the wind, and the insect blood we all have on our hands.
Li showing the tiny camera to Clyde Vega, the rancher who kindly let her do research on his land. Mr. Vega’s family has lived in the Wild Horse Valley for many generations, and he helped Li ground her perspective on Mormon cricket outbreaks in that area with his experience of working the land.
*Note on Naming: The “Mormon cricket” is not a true cricket, but a thick-bodied, outbreak-prone katydid. The name originates from 19th-century settler accounts that mythologized the insects during early days of the Latter Day Saints in the area now called “Pioneer Valley.” There are ongoing discussions, including a recent Utah state bill, about changing the common name of the insect to make it more communicative of the animal’s biological identity and to make it more useful for scientific communication. I think this is a complicated discussion and wrote a draft unpublished post here that is open for comments: Yes, we should rename the Mormon cricket, and Mormon oats while we are at it.
Li Murphy – WCC Coordinator | Li is a Master of Environmental Science candidate funded by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, focusing on the social and ecological dynamics of insect-human interactions. She is currently working on a project about Mormon crickets in the Intermountain West. Originally from Idaho, she has a particular fondness for the state insect, the Monarch butterfly. Prior to Yale, Li was dedicated to community science, managing field camps in the Great Basin, driving a roving mobile STEM outreach laboratory, and then briefly piloting a planetarium. She believes in providing more inroads and support to folks, especially those with marginalized identities, to participate in framing and practicing scientific research, especially research that drives allocation of resources and environmental decision-making. She holds a BA degree in biology and geology from Harvard University. Li volunteers for the American Geophysical Union Local Science Partners and serves on the board for the nonprofit Nonhuman Teachers. She can often be found jogging, trying to keep her succulents alive, or surfing badly. See what Li has been up to.
