page_title: Crickets as pets
section_title: Cricket biology
hierarchical_section_title: Crickets as pets / Cricket biology
context_page_description: Keeping crickets as pets emerged in China in early antiquity. Initially, crickets were kept for their "songs". In the early 12th century the Chinese people began holding cricket fights. Throughout the Imperial era the Chinese also kept pet cicadas and grasshoppers, but crickets were the favorites in the Forbidden City and with the commoners alike. The art of selecting and breeding the finest fighting crickets was perfected during the Qing dynasty and remained a monopoly of the imperial court until the beginning of the 19th century.
  The Imperial patronage promoted the art of making elaborate cricket containers and individual cricket homes. Traditional Chinese cricket homes come in three distinct shapes: wooden cages, ceramic jars, and gourds. Cages are used primarily for trapping and transportation. Gourds and ceramic jars are used as permanent cricket homes in winter and summer, respectively. They are treated with special mortar to enhance the apparent loudness and tone of a cricket's song. The imperial gardeners grew custom-shaped molded gourds tailored to each species of cricket.
context_section_description: True crickets are insects of the Gryllidae, a cosmopolitan family of around 100 genera comprising some 800 species, belonging to the order Orthoptera. Crickets, like other Orthoptera (grasshoppers and katydids), are capable of producing high-pitched sound by stridulation. Crickets differ from other Orthoptera in four aspects: Crickets possess three-segmented tarsi and long antennae; their tympanum is located at the base of the front tibia; and the females have long, slender ovipositors.
  The life cycle of a cricket usually spans no more than three months. The larvae of the field cricket hatch from eggs in 7–8 days, while those of Acheta domesticus develop in 11–12 days. Development of the larvae in a controlled, warm (30 °C (86 °F)) farm environment takes four to five weeks for all cultivated species. After the fourth or fifth larval instar the wingless larvae moult into the winged imago which lives for around one month. Crickets are omnivorous, opportunistic scavengers. They feed on decaying vegetable matter and fruit, and attack weaker insects or their larvae.
  A male cricket "sings" by raising his wing covers (tegmina) above the body and rubbing their bases against each other. The wing covers of a mature male cricket have protruding, irregularly shaped veins. The scraper of the left wing cover rubs against the file of the right wing, producing a high-pitched chirp. Crickets are much smaller than the sound wavelengths that they emit, which makes them inefficient transducers, but they overcome this disadvantage by using external natural resonators. Ground-dwelling field crickets use their funnel-shaped burrow entrances as acoustic horns; Oecanthus burmeisteri attach themselves to leaves which serve as soundboards and increase sound volume by 15 to 47 times. Chinese handlers increase the apparent loudness of their captive crickets by waxing the insects' tympanum with a mixture of cypress or lacebark pine tree sap and cinnabar. A legend says that this treatment was discovered in the day of the Qing Dynasty, when the Emperor's cricket, held in a cage suspended from a pine tree, was observed to develop an "unusually beautiful voice" after accidentally dipping its wings in tree sap.
  Entomologists from Ivan Regen onward have agreed that the principal purpose of a male cricket's "song" is to attract females for mating. Berthold Laufer and Frank Lutz recognized the fact but noted that it was not clear why males do it continuously throughout most of their adult lives, when actual mating doesn't take much time. More is known about the attractive mechanism of a cricket's song. Scientists exposed cricket females to synthesized "cricket songs", carefully varying different acoustic parameters, and measured the degree of females' response to different sounds. They found that although each species has its own optimal mating call, the repetition rate of chirp "syllables" was the single most important parameter. A male's singing skills do not guarantee him instant success: other, silent, males may be waiting nearby to intercept the females he attracts. Other males may be attracted by the song and rush to the singer just as females do. When another cricket confronts a singing male, the two insects determine each other's sex by touching their antennae. If it turns out that both crickets are male, the contact leads to a fight. Crickets, and Orthoptera in general, are model organisms for the study of male-male aggression, although females can also be aggressive. According to Judge and Bonanno, the shape and size of male crickets' heads are a direct result of selection through male-male fights.
  The fact that only males sing, and only males fight, means that females have little value as pets apart from breeding. Chinese keepers feed young home-bred females to birds as soon as crickets display sexual dimorphism. There is one notable exception: males of Homoeogryllus japonicus (suzumushi or jin zhong) sing only in the presence of females, so some females are spared to provide company to the males.
caption: A male field cricket "sings" facing the entrance into his burrow, which serves as a resonator.
  About this sound"Song" of Gryllus
  pennsylvanicus (help·info)
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