2005-09-12

Speaking of Bugs

I got in a big disagreement with one of the girls I'm living with yesterday - about the colour of crickets!

Somehow one of the noisy fellows got into our kitchen, and even though I'd rather just ignore him, she talked me into pulling the oven out so she could crawl around behind it and ...well...shut him up, but good! After catching and squishing the poor little guy she says "wait - this is a cockroach!!" I assured her it wasn't. It didn't even look like a cockroach - it was a cricket. Then she proceeded to tell me, that in our climate black crickets could not survive!! We could only have GREEN crickets.

" WHAT? Are you kidding me?" I asked her, "ALL crickets are black. The only crickets I've ever seen that weren't black, were the ones you buy for your lizard in the pet store - the soft shell ones."

"No," she persisted, "I've done alot of work with crickets, and I know - only the green ones can exist in our climate!"

"There's no such thing as a green cricket! You are thinking of grass hoppers!"I countered, but she wasn't convinced. "Here," I wipped out my laptop, "I'll proove it to you."

"Well, if you have to look it up on the internet, then I obviously know more about crickets than you, and am right."

I looked up the page anyway, and I found the cricket she caught - the "Northern Field Cricket" and its habitat? British Columbia to Nova Scotia. Triumphantly I showed her.

But she won the argument with a final, uncontestable comment.

"That cricket can't survive in our climate - you have to look it up based on temperature." Oh. Silly me - - -

http://collections.ic.gc.ca/biodiversity/family/Gryllidae.html