12/22/2020: Treating the winter blues with Eunemobius (TM)

Every year, the day after the winter solstice I love to say… it’s spring. In three (debatably) short months, the sun will shine, the birds will sing, the flowers will bloom, and summer in the northern hemisphere will be tantalizingly within reach. Then I look outside at the snow or dreary brown and get snapped back to reality. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
While experimenting with new screening or propagation techniques I’ll sometimes accidentally culture something new or useful. The last few months have revealed some flaws with my wood sterilization protocol, but fortunately the perpetrator is completely benign and welcome.
Perhaps the biggest contributor to the feeling of stagnant death that winter brings is the lack of sound. Summer is alive with frog songs and bird calls, but the true hallmark of summer in my opinion is the insect sounds. It’s difficult to imagine a June without the chirps of spring field crickets, or a July afternoon without cicadas. While my cockroach cultures do produce an assortment of amusing sounds occasionally (mostly noisy male hissers telling each other off or the skitter and squeaking of cockroach feet against container bottoms), the Roach Crossing bug room is relatively quiet. However, this is not the case currently.
A trill resonates about the house this dark December; the enthusiastic cry of Eunemobius carolinus, the Carolina ground cricket. These hitchhikers survived a scalding water treatment on several batches of woodchips; in fact, I believe the intense heat broke the intrinsic diapause their eggs require to hatch and thus led to a sudden population explosion in the bins I had added the chips to. While this has happened before and resulted in a small replicating population in a few enclosures, the sonic display is certainly at its zenith this winter.
Thus, my woeful winter days have become alive with the sounds of a splendid summer day, and I’m grateful that these little guys have graced my home. I have not observed any negative interactions with the isopods, roaches, or millipedes in the bins they have popped up in, so I would highly recommend them for any enclosure whether it’s a small hobby culture or larger display. I’ll be working on isolating them for larger scale production, and if I can do this successfully they’ll be posted for sale eventually. For now, this Gryllid gets a gold star for manners, effort, and performance quality from me!
-Kyle