Cockroaches, Locusts, Grasshoppers, and Crickets 157 
of which sing very pleasantly. In Idaho and other northwestern states 
a large corpulent wingless Locustid, called the western cricket, Anabrus 
purpurascens (Figs. 218 and 219), often occurs in 
such numbers as to be very destructive to crops. 
The body of this cricket is ij inches long and 
\ inch thick. The ovipositor is three-fourths as 
long as the body, slightly curved, and sword-shaped 
with a sharp point. This species forms march¬ 
ing armies in Nevada, with two miles of front and 
a thousand feet of depth. On the Pacific Coast 
occurs a large, awkward, thick-legged, transversely 
striped form, Stenopelmatus, called sand-cricket or 
Jerusalem cricket (Fig. 220). It is found under 
stones or in the soil, has a large smooth head with 
“baby-face,” and is believed to feed on dead plant 
or animal matter. 
The crickets that we know best are the black 
and brown ones of the house and the fields; but 
there are members of the cricket family, the Gryl- 
lidse, that live in trees and are pale greenish white, 
and others that burrow into the ground and have 
broad shovel-like fore feet, and still other curious 
little wingless pygmies that live as guests in ants’ 
nests. But the house- and field-crickets represent the more usual or we 
might say normal and typical kind of Gryllid; 
the others are modifications or offshoots of this 
type, both in habit and structure. In ail the 
antennae are long and slender (except in the 
burrowing forms, longer than the body), the hind 
legs long and thickened for leaping, and the 
ovipositor, when exserted and visible, long, slender, 
subcylindrical and lance- or spear-like. Well- 
developed wings and wing-covers are present in 
most species, and the males are provided with a 
very effective stridulating organ on the bases of 
the wing-covers.. 
In the familiar black, bright-eyed, loud-voiced 
house- and field-crickets the wing-covers when 
folded on the body are flat above and bent down 
sharply at the edge of the body like a box-cover, and the veins in the males 
are curiously changed in course and specially thickened and roughened 
to make a sound-producing organ. This organ is illustrated in Fig. 222. 
Fig. 222.—Cricket and file 
(part of the sound-making 
apparatus). (Cricket nat¬ 
ural size; the file greatly 
magnified.) 
Fig. 221. — A common 
cricket, Gryllus pennsyl- 
vanicus , female. (After 
Lugger; natural size in¬ 
dicated by line.) 
