WYOMING — Driving through the Bighorn Mountains, Mormon crickets may not cross the mind, but the insects have purposely been placed there for years to be researched.
United States Department of Agriculture research ecologist Dr. Robert Srygley has dedicated 17 years to research all things Mormon crickets, especially the egg banks the crickets lay.
“Mormon crickets have been a problem for subsistence farmers for a long time,” Srygley said. “This is one of the areas where there’s likely to be egg banks scattered around. We don’t really know where they are, but we’ve been planting our own eggs."
Srygley has different research locations in the Bighorns, as well as different states such as Oregon and Arizona. The multiple locations help him better research how elevation, temperature, precipitation and nutrients can affect Mormon cricket egg development.
In the Bighorn Mountains, there are eggs buried in mesh bags and more recently, Mormon crickets themselves placed into different patches of grass that have been given different nutrients for the last few years. This will add another layer to research once they are able to mate the crickets that have been in those different grass areas.
“We’ve been interested in what can the egg do to change its fate, and also we’re interested in what the parent can do in order to change the fate of the egg," he said. "The parent is kind of the one that’s in charge of when the eggs are going to develop.”
Mormon cricket eggs were once thought to develop and hatch in a year or two at maximum. Srygley's research has proven otherwise. He has some eggs buried in the mountains that have not hatched in eight years.
“These are really long experiments,” he said. “What we’re going to figure out in terms of how the outbreaks originate and how the migrations of these Mormon crickets in these bands move, will have a lot to do with the egg beds.”
