A house cricket on a rough concrete floor
On a rough concrete surface against a dark wall in Lombok, a small cricket sat motionless, its long antennae sweeping the air. It was a soft, light brown, with long slender legs, and it seemed perfectly at home on the man-made surface, which made sense once I thought about where it lives. This is a cricket that has followed humans around the world.
This is Gryllodes sigillatus, the tropical house cricket, a member of the family Gryllidae in the order Orthoptera. The species name sigillatus means sealed or marked with a seal, and it is the most widespread house cricket in the tropics, found wherever people build warm, dry shelters. Unlike field crickets that live in burrows and meadows, this species thrives around buildings, drains and rubbish, singing from cracks in walls when the sun goes down.
It is smaller and paler than the common field crickets, and the males sing with a soft, rapid trill rather than the loud chirp of Gryllus species. The song is a familiar sound of tropical nights, coming from gaps in concrete and corners of rooms where the cricket is rarely seen but constantly heard.
Finding one out in the open on a concrete floor was a small lesson in cricket geography. Some crickets are creatures of the meadow, and some are creatures of the doorstep. This one clearly read the sign that says humans live here, and decided that was a good career move.
