The Case of the Escapee Crickets

As our dedicated readers know, Avery our chameleon, eats crickets.  In the winter the crickets live in their Cricket Keeper cage in the basement storage room.  They kind of stink though so during the rest of the year, they live out in the garage.  It is kind of smelly in there already, so what is a little added cricket odour?

Lately; however, it seems the crickets have been disappearing from their cage.  We always buy 100 crickets at a time, which should last (give or take) two weeks.  The mystery is that after about a week, the Cricket Keeper is empty.  There are a few dead crickets at the bottom of the cage (which is expected) but nowhere near 50 dead ones.  Where did the missing crickets go?

After careful observation, I have come up with a few clues.

Clue 1: I keep seeing rogue crickets running willy nilly around the garage.  Especially irritating is the cricket that sits right in front of the garage door all day and only runs away when I open the door to go out the feed the chickens.  He is taunting me.

Clue 2: The bucket to catch drips from the hose faucet in the garage is full of drowned crickets.

Based on the available evidence, it seems reasonable to conclude that some of the crickets are (rather unsuccessfully) attempting to live in the garage.  This leads to my second query: how on Earth are crickets escaping from the Cricket Keeper?  It is supposed to be like the Fort Knox for crickets and besides, why weren't the crickets escaping when the cage was in the basement.  (Uh oh, maybe they were and I just didn't notice and now we have a herd of rogue crickets living in the basement...ew.)

The mystery continues....