Snowy tree cricket
The snowy tree cricket is a slim, pale green cricket with see-through wings and very long feelers. It sings high up in bushes and trees on summer nights. Its song is so famous that films use it to tell you it is a quiet summer night.
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Fun facts
It is also called the thermometer cricket. Count its chirps in 15 seconds, add 40, and you get the temperature in Fahrenheit.
The warmer it is, the faster it chirps.
Only the males sing, and they often sing together like a choir.
A writer once said its song sounds the way moonlight would sound if you could hear it.
Sometimes it sits so high in an oak tree that you can only find it by its song.
Most asked questions about Snowy tree cricket
?Why is it called the thermometer cricket?
Because how fast it chirps depends on how warm it is, so you can work out the temperature from its song.
?How big is a snowy tree cricket?
About 1.5 to 1.8 centimetres long.
?When can you hear snowy tree crickets?
Adults are around from the middle of July to the middle of November.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Oecanthus fultoni
- Group
- Grasshoppers and crickets
- Family
- Gryllidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Orthoptera > Gryllidae
- Lives on
- North America
- Also known as
- Thermometer cricket
Where the facts come from
- Oecanthus fultoni (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Calibas at English Wikipedia. Public domain, 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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