A Cool Cricket Gets Invited to Dinner

Chameleons can eat a variety of insects (e.g. wax worms, meal worms, super worms, fruit flies, flies, moths and grasshoppers) but since worms gross me out (a lot) and the other bugs aren't available for purchase in the pet store, our chameleon's diet consists of house crickets (called Acheta domesticus).

I'll explain more about the lives of our soon-to-be-dinner house crickets in a future post, but today I noticed something quite neat happening in the cricket cage - a cricket molting.

Crickets have direct development (gradual metamorphosis) in which the larva (immature insect) resembles the adult (mature insect) except for being a smaller size and having a lack of wings.  There are three stages of development in the life cycle of the house cricket: egg, larva and adult.  Only the adults have wings and can reproduce.

Like ocean crabs or lobsters who cannot grow their existing shell to make it a bigger size, crickets cannot grow their outer skin either.  As such, in order to grow larger, they molt out of their old exoskeleton and emerge from underneath with a new skeleton.

Our cricket molting - see the white cricket emerging downward out of the old brown skin?

At room temperature, there are ten larval instars (or stages) to house cricket development.  At the end of each larval instar there is a molt to the next larval instar in which old skin is cast off in one piece.  The next instar has a new and larger skin into which the cricket can grow.  Larvae roughly double their size in each molt.  

Our crickets are usually brown coloured but when a cricket emerges from its molt it is soft and milky white in colour - it looks albino.  Interestingly, newly molted crickets require several hours for their new skeleton to harden after which they assume the normal gray-brown colour.

Newly molted cricket.

Too bad being noticeably cooler than the other crickets is a great way to get yourself invited to dinner - not the outcome you are hoping for when you are the dinner.  Down the hatch!

Source: "Fluker's Cricket Biology Guide."  Accessed February 11, 2013 from http://www.flukerfarms.com/pdfs/cricket.pdf