Late summer and early autumn are probably my favourite times of year. I enjoy the mild, calm twilight in the evenings and the sweet trilling of crickets.
Field crickets, like many invertebrates, have short life spans, or live for a long time as a grub or nymph, transforming into adults for just one summer. As the weather cools, many of the noisier and more visible insects around us disappear.
Much of the invertebrate life in our native ecosystems, however, carries on quietly and generally unseen. One of the most mysterious and weird of our invertebrates is the native mole cricket. Like the very familiar field cricket (Teleogryllus commodus) common to New Zealand and Australia, the mole cricket is ground dwelling and nocturnal. It inhabits burrows between 10-20cm deep and sometimes emerges during the night in wet weather. Occasionally people come across them, but they are rarely seen.
Mole crickets are found worldwide, and all have the same strange-looking body arrangement. Their head and thorax look curiously like a mole, and their front legs, used for digging, also resemble the front feet of a mole. The abdomen of most mole crickets look similar to a field cricket, with short wings used for singing as part of their courtship. The New Zealand native mole cricket differs, having no ears, no wings and making no sounds.
Unlike many insects, female mole crickets do not usually lay their eggs and abandon them. Instead, they create an underground chamber and guard their eggs until they hatch. In the insect world, care of young is usually seen among social insects such as ants and bees, rather than solitary insects.
