SUBJECT: Crickets
DATE: 4/96
Does anyone have any advice or suggestions for working with adult
crickets in a non-majors lab. How do you handle the crickets? I've been
told that they do not carry diseases, is this true? Are there any safety
concerns? I am particularly concerned about how to get them from the
small, and once opened, VERY open chambers back into the holding pen. I'm
also interested in knowing if students have a problem working with them.
Thanks in advance. --cmw
Charlene M. Waggoner, Ph.D.
Department of Biological Sciences
Bowling Green, State University
Bowling Green, OH 43403
cwaggon@bgnet.bgsu.edu
For information about crickets in the lab (as well as other animals) I recommend
Barbara Orlans' Animal Care from Protozoa to Small Mammals. It is published
by
Addison/Wesley. We do many experiments with crickets and have never had
any
problems.
Ken Gregg
greggk@winthrop.edu
We use crickets in our introductory biology laboratory for animal behavior
experiments. We eliminate the handling issue by presenting the crickets
to
students in plexiglas boxes with a vertical sliding door on one end. The
boxes, which come in "male" and "female" types, can
be hooked together;
when the encounter is to begin the sliding doors are removed and the
crickets are free to interact without the students ever handling them.
If you need to handle crickets, all you need to do is make a little house
with your hands so the cricket can't get out or won't get squashed. There
will be some students who will have difficulty with this, though the
crickets won't hurt them, won't spit out juice, and don't carry any
diseases that I know of.
We keep the crickets in a large trashcan with pieces of cut potato and dog
kibble or mouse chow; they will also need a place to hide and we usually
just put in the egg carton material that comes with the shipment. If you
need to move them around, put them in a plastic container that is deep and
not very wide; rubbermaid makes some suitable containers that the crickets
don't jump out of easily, even with the lids off.
Good luck!
Sara Hiebert
Department of Biology
Swarthmore College
Swarthmore PA 19081
610-328-8053
The only safety concern that I am aware of in crickets would be a
possible danger of allergies developing in the people that handle
insects regularly. This would not be a concern for the students using
crickets in a lab, but could be a problem for the person maintaining
the colony and handling them often. Insect scales (such as
leidopteran scales)are probably the worst offender, but the minute
"hairs" of other orders can also cause allergies in people who
are
exposed to them for extended per iods of time. Using rubber gloves
and a face mask could help if you have daily contact with an insect,
but should be unnecessry for students using an insect for just one lab
period. Lucy Dyer
(Biology Department, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, N.B.)
We offer investigative biology to elementary ed majors. The course consists
of
a series of progressively longer series of experiments. A lot of guidance
is
provided at first, but less and less instructor input into selection and
design
occurs as the semester moves along. We often work with crickets. Since I
was
asked what types of experiments we do, here are some of them that I can
remember:
Place one or more crickets in a long (~ 1 meter) glass or clear plastic
tube with screen mesh or one-holed stoppers in the ends. Mix or match
sexes. Use a sound generator and a speaker at one end to play different
frequencies of sound to see how the crickets respond.
Using the same set-up, but with one-holed stoppers, we test responses to
odors and/or humidity. Use an aquarium air pump and a t connector to
pump equal volumes of air into two separate jars which have two-holed
stoppers in them. Use one jar as a control and place something
odoriferous in the other jar. Connect tubing between the second stopper
holes and the ends of the tube with the cricket(s) to see how they
respond to the odors. Odoriferous materials can include other crickets,
ants, beetles, corn meal, diluted ammonia, various plant parts, rotten
wood, praying mantis, water, etc.
We use the same set-up to test temperature preferences -- heating pad
and crushed ice at opposite ends.
Students have taken crickets into a quiet room (light or dark) to see
how mixing or matching sexes affects chirping. How temperature affects
chirping. How odors affect chirping.
Crickets can be placed in a glass Y connector or in a plexiglas Y maze
and tested for color preference using various colors of cellophane. We
use a light meter to determine how many layers of different colors of
cellophane are needed to equalize the foot-candles of transmitted light.
Once preferences are established, we can blow odors into the ends of the
maze to determine whether we can use odors to override color
preferences.
If you can get different species of crickets, you can do all the above
in order to compare species, and you can do variations of the above
with interspecific behavior as another variable.
Some where I saw an abstract (quite a few years ago) which dealt with a
computer
program which would simulate cricket chirping. If anyone knows where that
is, I
would like to know. Such a program could be modified in various ways to
see
what responses would result.
Those are all the experiments I can dredge up at the moment.
Ken Gregg
greggk@winthrop.edu