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Sticker of House cricket
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House cricket

Acheta domesticus
Eats: A bit of everythingGrasshoppers and cricketsHouses and farms6 legs

The house cricket is a grey or brownish cricket with long feelers and strong jumping legs. It likes warm places in and around buildings. Many people keep house crickets as food for pet lizards, and in China and Japan people keep them as pets.

Lives in
First from Southwest Asia, now all over the world, often in and around houses
Length
1.6 to 2.1 cm (0.63 to 0.83 in)
Top speed
about 3.1 km/h (1.9 mph)
On foot, estimate
Can it hurt you?
Harmless
Harmless. It does not sting, and it is happy to hop away from you.
What does it eat?
It eats almost anything: flowers, leaves, fruit, grass and other insects. Crickets kept in boxes happily eat apples, carrots, oats and pet food.
For real!Photo of House cricket
Picture by Geyersberg, Professor emeritus Hans Schneider. CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

How big is it?

How long is it?

House cricket about 2.1 cm long (0.83 in)A grain of rice about 6 mm (0.24 in)A toy building brick about 3.2 cm (1.3 in)A crayon about 9 cm (3.5 in)
as long as 4 grains of rice in a rowcould run across a dinner table in 1.2 secondsmoves 41 times its own body length every second

How big is House cricket compared to YOU?

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How fast is it?

cool stuff

Fun facts

1

The female has a long, thin tube at the back of her body that she uses to lay eggs in damp ground.

2

Baby crickets look like small grown-ups, but without wings.

3

People eat house crickets too. They can be roasted or ground into cricket flour.

4

Since 2022, house crickets are allowed as food in the European Union.

5

In warm weather a house cricket grows from egg to grown-up in just two or three months.

you asked

Most asked questions about House cricket

?Can you eat house crickets?

Yes. They are farmed as food in parts of Asia, Europe and North America, often roasted or made into flour.

?How big is a house cricket?

It is about 1.6 to 2.1 centimetres long.

?What do house crickets eat?

Plants, fruit, grains and other insects. They are not fussy eaters.

For bug experts

Scientific name
Acheta domesticus
Group
Grasshoppers and crickets
Family
Gryllidae
Classification
Insecta > Orthoptera > Gryllidae
Lives on
Asia, Europe, Africa, North America, South America, Australia and Oceania

Where the facts come from

  1. House cricket (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
  2. Picture by Geyersberg, Professor emeritus Hans Schneider. CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.

If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.

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