Stones, Zeppelin Songs Combat Crickets

04/30/09 5:09pm

by Kate Harper (CHARTattack)

Imagine waking up with a cricket on your head. Imagine crickets swarming everywhere outside your house. It sounds like some kind of Biblical plague, but it's actually affecting Tuscarora, Nev. so badly that the residents have resorted to blasting rock 'n' roll to combat them.

These aren't just ordinary crickets, either. They're Mormon crickets. I'm not making some kind of terrible, politically incorrect joke. They're called Mormon crickets because they annoyed the hell out of a Mormon settlement in the 1800s.

"You'll wake up and there'll be one sitting on your forehead, looking at you," resident Laura Moore told the Wall Street Journal newspaper.

Thousands of Mormon crickets descend upon Tuscarora every year between May and August, and its residents decided to deal with them by blasting Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stones songs for a few days during the peak cricket season.

The residents first tried out the tactic three years ago after reading a 1934 article about keeping crickets away by hitting gongs.

"Crickets kind of sleep at night, so I would wake up first thing in the morning and get the music on and we would shut the music off at night," Moore told the newspaper.

This practice seems ridiculous, but residents of Tuscarora say it actually works and the crickets have stayed away from the music since.

You might think blasting music all day might annoy anyone else in the town, but given that there are only 13 people living there, we don't really think it matters so much.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the crickets hatch in April and grow into blood-red insects that are more than two inches long. Then they march in massive columns in search of food, destroying crops and leafy vegetaion along the way, before they lay eggs and die in August.

They also swarm the roads, and so many dead ones piled up on a highway last year that Elko County, Nev. called in snowplows to scrape them off the road. Gross.

See, there are worse things than swine flu to worry about!