Jiminy Christmas!
Millions of cannibalistic Mormon crickets have descended on Nevada, Oregon and Idaho, prompting fears that the pestilence could decimate crops and create dangerously slick conditions on roads.
Skin-crawling videos show the swarms inundating cars and backyards in scenes that are drawing comparisons to the plague of locusts described in the Bible.
Measuring between 1.5 to 2 inches in length, these large flightless insects are not actually crickets, but rather a close relative that wreaks havoc on plants much like grasshoppers, Boise Dev reported. In fact, the pests reportedly drive their name from a notorious 1800s swarm that ravaged grain and barley fields in the Mormon settlements and Utah.
Not to content to just gorge on crops, however, these opportunistic critters also notoriously cannibalistic, notably feeding on members of their own kind that become injured or fall behind.
This recent bug boom was caused by favorable temperatures in the Winter and Spring. “The massive Mormon cricket infestation taking over Ashton is primarily driven by the region’s dry winter and warm spring, which created ideal conditions for prolific, early egg hatching,” wrote meteorologist Matt Johnson on Facebook. “Additionally, these insects operate in multi-year population cycles and tend to peak during prolonged stretches of drought.”
Experts fear that the pestilence has the potential to cause an a-crop-alypse by wreaking havoc on farms and gardens. Meanwhile, so many of the bugs are dying on the roads that they’re making them slippery and befouling the air.
“The crickets are causing nuisance conditions where they are creating road hazards due to large densities over the road and associated odor from crickets that have been run over [by motor vehicles],”said Joey Nikirk, a spokesman for the Bureau of Land Management in Washington and Oregon.
They’re also infesting people’s property.
One Ashton resident named Sonja Yearsley shared an Instagram video of her parents house and lawn covered in a carpet of crickets so thick that there’s an audible “crunch” each time she steps.
“Their dog won’t even go outside,” she lamented in the caption. “Apparently it’s the worst cricket infestation in 100 years for east Idaho.”
Another victim shared a video on X of the creatures crawling all over his camera pack.
In a third clip, a motorist filmed themselves running over a deluge of crickets that had swarmed over a highway near Dinosaur National Monument on the border of Utah and Colorado. They wrote that the “f–king gross huge cockroach cricket looking like things” were “everywhere for miles.”
Viewers were horrified by the scourge with one exclaiming, “Annnddddd…I’m never leaving my house…EVER.”
Another wrote, “Can u imagine hearing a million crickets chirping at night.”
A third shared a verse from Revelation’s Fifth Trumpet judgment, in which a plague of supernatural locusts emerges from a bottomless pit to torment non-believers.
“And there came out of the smoke Locusts upon the earth, and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power,” they wrote.
Some unsurprisingly took the opportunity to lampoon the cricket’s namesake. “How do they know they’re Mormons do they have more than one wife,” quipped one.
In light of the plague, county officials in Iowa are urging residents to report infestations and seek assistance so they can nip them in the bud via bait treatments and other measures, Local News 8 reported.
In the past, officials have even resorted to using snow plows to clear the swarms off Idaho highways.
“Good to see the plows used in the summer,” said one commenter.