House Cricket (Acheta domesticus): Facts, Chirping and Diet

What does a house cricket look like?

The house cricket is a slim, light yellowish-brown to gray-brown insect with long, thread-like antennae that are longer than its body. Its head carries three dark bands, one between the eyes and two farther back, which help separate it from the darker field crickets. The thorax is broad and flattened, and the strong hind legs are built for jumping.

Adults have wings that lie flat on the back. The front wings are tough and leathery, and in males they carry the sound-producing equipment, so they look more veined and wrinkled than those of females. The hind wings are thin and folded underneath, often sticking out behind like a pair of tails.

At the rear of the body are two long, flexible feelers called cerci. Females also have a long, dark, needle-like tube between them, the ovipositor, which they push into soil or other damp material to lay their eggs. Despite its sharp look, the ovipositor is not a sting.

How big is a house cricket?

Adult house crickets measure about 16–21 mm (0.6–0.8 in) long, not counting the antennae, and weigh well under a gram. Males and females are similar in size. Young crickets, called nymphs, hatch at only about 2–3 mm long and look like tiny wingless adults.

Crickets are often confused with grasshoppers, but they differ in antennae, ears and the way they make sound, as explained in grasshopper vs cricket.

Habitat and range

The house cricket is most likely native to southwest Asia, and possibly northern Africa, where it lives outdoors. It spread with people and their goods long ago and has been part of European homes for centuries. It later reached North America and many other parts of the world.

In cool and temperate climates, house crickets depend on human warmth. They live in heated buildings, cellars, bakeries, boiler rooms and greenhouses, and on rubbish dumps where rotting waste gives off heat. In warmer regions, such as the southern United States, they also live outdoors in gardens and fields, especially near houses. They have no special winter resting stage, so in cold places they survive only where it stays warm.

In Britain and parts of northern Europe the house cricket was once common in kitchens and around fireplaces but has become much rarer in homes, partly because of modern hygiene and building methods. Wild populations there now survive mainly at heated rubbish tips.

What do house crickets eat?

House crickets are omnivores and scavengers. They eat a wide range of plant material, including leaves, seeds, grains, fruit and flowers, and they also eat dead insects and weak or injured insects, including other crickets. This flexible diet is one reason why they thrive around people, who leave plenty of scraps.

They feed with chewing mouthparts, much like grasshoppers. In the wild, they find food mainly at night, using their long antennae to touch, smell and taste their surroundings.

How do house crickets chirp?

Only adult males chirp. Each front wing has a thick vein along its underside with a row of tiny teeth, called the file, and a hardened edge called the scraper. To sing, the male raises his front wings at an angle and rubs them together, so the scraper of one wing runs across the file of the other. This method of making sound by rubbing body parts together is called stridulation.

Thin areas of the wing vibrate like the skin of a drum and amplify the sound. The result is a short, repeated chirp, usually heard in the evening and at night. Males sing a loud calling song to attract females from a distance, a softer courtship song when a female is close, and an aggressive song when they meet another male. The details are explained in why do crickets chirp.

Like all insects, crickets are cold-blooded, so they chirp faster in warm weather and slower in cool weather. Whether you can use this to estimate the temperature is covered in can crickets tell the temperature.

Ears on the legs

Crickets hear with ears on their front legs. Just below the “knee” of each front leg is a small, oval membrane called a tympanum, which works like an eardrum. Sound reaching the eardrums, both from outside and through internal air tubes, lets a female work out which direction a singing male is calling from.

Females walk toward the song of a male of their own species, a behavior called phonotaxis. Male crickets also listen to each other, keeping their distance from rival singers or approaching to fight.

Behavior and fighting

House crickets are active mainly at night and hide by day in cracks, under objects and in other dark, sheltered places. They can walk, jump with their long hind legs and, as adults, fly. They are often attracted to lights on warm evenings.

Males defend small areas around their shelters and fight when they meet. A typical fight begins with antenna fencing, continues with aggressive song, and may escalate to grappling and biting until one male retreats. In many crickets the winner then sings, and a male that has just lost a fight is less willing to fight again for a while.

Life cycle and lifespan

After mating, the female uses her ovipositor to lay eggs one at a time into damp soil, sand or other moist material. The eggs hatch after about two weeks in warm conditions. The nymphs look like small, wingless adults and grow by shedding their skin about eight to ten times. Wing buds appear in the later stages, and full wings form only at the final molt.

House crickets have incomplete metamorphosis, meaning there is no pupa: the nymph changes gradually into the adult. At about 26–32 °C (79–90 °F), the whole cycle from egg to adult takes about two to three months; in cooler conditions it takes much longer. Adults usually live a few weeks to about two months, so a house cricket’s entire life lasts only a few months, and several generations can follow one another in a year where it stays warm.

Predators and threats

House crickets are eaten by spiders, centipedes, ground beetles, lizards, frogs, toads, birds, shrews and many other small animals. Indoors, house spiders and mice are among their main predators. Crickets rely on hiding by day and on quick jumps to escape.

The species has not been assessed for the IUCN Red List. It is extremely widespread and is bred in vast numbers in captivity, so it is not at risk worldwide, even though wild populations have declined in some northern countries.

Myths and facts

Myth: crickets chirp by rubbing their legs together. That is how many grasshoppers make sound. Crickets rub their two front wings together; their legs play no part in the song, although they carry the ears.

Myth: female crickets sing too. In the house cricket, as in almost all crickets, only adult males chirp. Females are silent but have good hearing and choose mates by their songs.

Fact: the “stinger” is an egg-laying tube. The long spike at the rear of a female is the ovipositor. It is used only to place eggs in damp soil and cannot sting.

Fact: a cricket in the house was once welcome. In many parts of Europe, a chirping house cricket by the hearth was considered a sign of good luck, and killing one was thought to bring misfortune.

Fact: house crickets are not true wild natives in most of their range. Outside southwest Asia, almost all populations descend from crickets carried by people, which is why they are tied so closely to buildings and warm waste.

House crickets and people

For centuries, the house cricket’s song has been part of daily life in Europe. Charles Dickens built his 1845 Christmas story “The Cricket on the Hearth” around a cricket chirping by the fire, a traditional sign of a happy home. In China, people have kept singing crickets in small cages for many centuries.

Between about 1950 and 2000, the house cricket became the standard insect bred to feed reptiles, birds and laboratory animals, and it was spread around the world by this trade. In the 2000s, viral outbreaks devastated many commercial colonies in Europe and North America, and many breeders switched to other species such as the banded cricket.

Today, house crickets are also farmed as food for people. They are widely eaten in Southeast Asia, and in Europe they were approved as a food in Switzerland in 2017 and in the European Union in 2022, sold frozen, dried or ground into cricket powder. House crickets are rich in protein, and farming them needs far less land and water than raising livestock, although large-scale insect farming has proven hard to make profitable.