03/04/05 Mormon cricket research continues

Southwestern Idaho farmer Paul Nettleton says it's almost scary. NETTLETON " It's almost like you see something out of a horror movie." (Laugh) The Owyhee County farmer grows alfalfa to feed to his 650 cattle. Last year a huge band of Mormon crickets came out of the hills, marching straight toward Nettleton's field. NETTLETON " The ground was just black with them. I saw one throng that was about 100 yards wide and a quarter of a mile long. I thought looking at it from a distance it was a soil change. I just couldn't believe the ground would be that black with crickets." He and other farmers banded together and used poison bait to fight off the crickets. In the end they had minimal damage to the field. Greg Sword of the Agricultural Research Service in Montana has been studying Mormon crickets and he found that they best survive when they are bunched together, in the band formation Nettleton saw. SWORD "There's just a remarkable cost of not being in a group. Those that were removed from the group suffered about 50 to 60 percent predation where as everyone that we left in the band survived no problem." He also found that the flightless crickets can travel up to two kilometers per day. Sword tracked the Mormon crickets by gluing tiny radio transmitters to their bodies. SWORD "Its about a fourth of the cricket's body weight or so and we get about a half mile range on the transmitter." Sword says the crickets have been reported from central Utah to Washington State. In Nebraska and South Dakota where they had never seen a Mormon cricket before they now report seeing plenty of them. No one is quite sure while they proliferate in such huge numbers over many years but weather does play some role. SWORD "Just because there's a drought doesn't mean that you're going to have a Mormon cricket outbreak so that's not a perfect predictor of outbreaks for these insects. Unfortunately we don't have a handle on that." Sword hopes his research can lead to more effective methods to control the crickets, locusts and other insects that band together in the millions. SWORD "Where we studied their survival that's just a small part of a much larger project that we're doing here in the US and other groups are doing in other parts of the world to understand the behaviors that the insects use to form these groups and determine why they go in specific directions and how far they're going to go." Line on Agriculture Bill Scott