Insect Cannibals.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 643, 22 December 1932, Page 10

Insect Cannibals.

Nature Notes.

By James Drummond, F.L.S., F.Z.S. (CHRISTCHURCH is fortunate in its freedom from plagues of crickets that sometimes harass North Island towns. In a favourable season, crickets there not only swarm through the houses. They devour many kinds of food, from clothing to grass, vegetables and fruit. They were so plentiful in one district a few years ago that a person could not walk over a paddock without killing many. They cropped the grass so short that the ground, seen from a distance, seemed absolutely bare. They were watched eating apples, and caused surprise at the rapidity with which they destroyed the fruit. They were cannibals. Coming out of their holes in the ground, they devoured dead crickets left on the surface. When rain got into cracks in the ground in which they lived, they came out in tens of thousands. An observer reported that the Californian quail was the only bird that destroyed them in large numbers. The Australian magpie did a little, but it had other food supplies, and it was not sufficiently plentiful there to make an appreciable difference in the crickets’ increasing numbers. Many residents of the Auckland Province know them by their Maori name, piha-reinga.