Cricket Puberty

I was finally able to keep my baby crickets alive for longer than three weeks.

Currently, my setup includes one box reserved for fully grown crickets, upon which I gaze with apprehension, and one for small ones. The baby cage is kept so that I can lower my hand into it and have crickets walk over it for the purpose of exposure therapy.

For live exposure, I started with the smallest crickets the Union Square Petco could offer: they were about the size of a grain of rice. It was much easier to accustom my mind to the sensation of my greatest enemy permitted to touch me when they were tiny and without exaggerated cricket features.

It is difficult to explain to an employee at Petco what I mean by tiny, slightly larger, medium, Jay-sized, teenage, Catherine-The-Great-sized, and huge crickets. Therefore, I knew that in order to slowly increase the fear factor I would need to grow the crickets myself. But they kept dying!

I quickly learned that crickets are not only cannibals, but fierce fighters, diseased, and have questionable survival instincts. Keeping them alive for two weeks was my record for months and months. Until one night.

During one of my Monday excursions to the pet store, I was waiting a suspiciously long amount of time near the cash register for someone to help me. Boredom overtook me, and so I began glancing around the aquatic area to entertain myself. They had a chameleon on sale, Pride t-shirts for dogs, and not much else to look at. When I turned my attention back to the register, I saw the answer to all my prayers: a box that said “Keep your insects alive for longer!” Needless to say, I was captivated.

They were selling jello shots containing nutrients that help facilitate a longer life for feeder insects. Knowing my cohorts intimately, I picked up the banana flavour.

The jello worked. My crickets are not only staying alive, but growing right in front of my eyes! The four that remain started out as grains of rice, and are now longer than black beans.

While this is incredible news, I am now forced to confront cricket puberty.

During my session today, I noticed that one of the crickets kept scooting across the box just like my dog does when his rear gets itchy. It was truly a wonder to behold, watching an insect exhibit such canine-like behaviour.

I realised then that it was because two of the crickets are female, and their ovipositors are starting to come in. A small, dark bud is beginning to emerge from their behinds, and my observations show that this is an itchy process.

When human females develop breasts, those tend to be itchy too. Crickets are becoming more personified to me, which comes with its own set of challenges. However, it is nice to know that my enemy and I share similar struggles, and we both like jello shots.