May 15, 2015
Hoppers
I’m not sure who started the trend, or when. But over the past year or so, primarily on Facebook and other social media, I’ve seen several instances of adults recreating the photos they posed in as children.
Some are better than others; in fact there are a few–like the three brothers who remade a series of pictures, including one of them all sitting together in the bathtub–that are downright hilarious.
While I laughed right along with everyone else at these “back to the future” types of photos, I never dreamed that I’d one day have the opportunity to recreate one myself. That is, until the night I reconnected with a family I grew up with: the Rhaphidophoridae.
Numerous individuals of this wacky clan, also known as the camel crickets, lived in the basement of my childhood home. Nocturnal by nature, they rarely showed themselves during the day. But, boy, when nighttime came–look out!
Though we didn’t have squillions of them, we never had to look hard to find these brown-striped, medium-sized insects. In fact, I swear, it often seemed like they would find us first. I remember how I’d go down to the basement to, say, wash my gym clothes, and not see a single bug. But then, in the few brief minutes it would take to empty my bag into the washer, measure the detergent and start the machine, the “hoppers, as we called them, would come out to see what the commotion was about.
A hopper on the basement wall, another on the floor. Maybe one more on a riser on the stairs.
The best nights were when my mom would need something from the basement and go down there alone. Invariably she’d find a hopper (or, it would find her) and invariably she’d let out a piercing shriek that, as I recall, could be heard quite clearly throughout the house–even above the music from the eight-track tapes I was fond of playing, loudly, back then.
It had been literally decades since I’d seen a hopper. Then, about a month ago, I was back at my folks’ house, rummaging through the basement, at night, when I spied a large female camel cricket, poised on the basement wall, her antennae quizzically checking me out. Ten feet away, I encountered a second individual, this one a male, also with antennae atwitch.
(As I’m writing this I’m realizing that the hoppers most likely were checking out not me, but rather each other. No matter though. Because I caught them both in a big jar and took them home with me, and because the two of them have been living together ever since in a large terrarium, I think they both got what they wanted.)
Although their most common name is camel cricket (use of the term “hopper” seems confined to my family) these insects tend to resemble spiders—spiders with really long legs. The antennae at the front of the body, along with the large and powerful hind legs, combine to give the impression that the crickets have more than six limbs. Hence the insects are also sometimes called spider crickets, or sprickets.
But it is yet another common name, the greenhouse cricket, which tells us the most about the status of Rhaphidophoridae in North America. According to BugGuide.net, the family includes 150 species in 23 genera. Of these, several native species—particularly those in the genus Ceuthophilus–have been known to live in basements and other dark, damp man-made structures.
However, a while back, someone noticed that the native camel/cave/spider/greenhouse crickets/sprickets have been joined by at least one introduced species, Diestrammena asynamora. With its boldly striped legs, and a lack of spines on its hind legs, it is relatively easy to differentiate from the native Ceuthophilids, which tend to be more mottled in appearance and sport natty spines on their back legs.
The Asian asynamora first was discovered on American soil in 1898, in a greenhouse in Minnesota. But today it occurs commonly in basements throughout the eastern United States—so commonly, in fact, that scientists are wondering if the nonnative greenhouse cricket is displacing the native species.
The only problem with proving this theory is that basements, generally speaking, are private and not easily accessible.
It’s for this reason that a research group called Your Wild Life has launched the Camel Cricket Project. Through photo submissions on their web site, http://crickets.yourwildlife.org, the scientists hope to discover just how prevalent the introduced species is, and in turn determine the status of our native sprickets.
Back when my folks and I found our first specimens, in the late 1960s, I distinctly remember poring over my Golden Guide to Insects, hoping to find anything that even remotely resembled our “hoppers.” What I wouldn’t have given then to have had a Camel Cricket Project to turn to!
The other day, with only a few clicks of the mouse, I was able to figure out that our hoppers are the nonnative
D. asynamora. What’s especially noteworthy is that my dad has long suspected that the insects arrived in a flat of Euonymus he bought in 1967…from a greenhouse…
Given our family’s long association with camel crickets, it’s only natural that we would have pictures of them. One in particular dates back to 1970. That’s the one we chose to recreate for this week’s column.
Now the question is, are these photos anything the Camel Cricket Project would be interested in?
Pam Erickson Otto is the manager of nature programs and interpretive services at the Hickory Knolls Discovery Center, a facility of the St. Charles Park District. She can be reached at 630-513-4346 or potto@stcparks.org.