Published October 26, 2026 · The Cricket Depot, San Antonio, Texas
Crickets are easy to overlook. They hide by day, sing at night and get eaten by almost everything. That last part is exactly why they matter. Crickets are a small but important piece of how ecosystems work, from the soil under your feet to the birds in your yard. Here's a look at what crickets do in nature, what we can learn from them, and why pet crickets should always stay indoors.
Recyclers on the ground
Many crickets are omnivores and scavengers. In the wild they eat decaying plant matter, fallen leaves, fungi, seeds, small dead insects and other organic debris. By chewing up dead material and passing it through their bodies, they help break it into smaller pieces that bacteria and fungi can finish off. That speeds up decomposition and returns nutrients to the soil, where plants can use them again.
They aren't the only decomposers, of course. Earthworms, beetles, millipedes, fungi and bacteria all do this work. But crickets are part of the team, especially in grasslands, leaf litter and fields.
Food for a long list of animals
Crickets are one of nature's most important snack foods. They are high in protein and fat and present in large numbers, and many animals depend on insects like them, including:
- Birds: many songbirds feed insects to their nestlings, and crickets and grasshoppers are on the menu.
- Reptiles: lizards, small snakes and turtles eat crickets in the wild, which is why they make such good feeders for pet reptiles.
- Amphibians: frogs, toads and salamanders snap them up.
- Small mammals: shrews, mice, bats and others eat crickets and similar insects.
- Spiders and other invertebrates: wolf spiders, mantises and centipedes all hunt crickets.
Because so much eats them, crickets help move energy from plants and decaying matter up the food chain. Fewer insects can mean less food for the birds, reptiles and amphibians above them.
Soil and nutrient cycling
Some crickets, such as field crickets and mole crickets, dig burrows or shelter in cracks in the soil. Digging and burrowing insects can help loosen soil and let air and water in. Their droppings and their bodies, when they die, add organic matter. These are small effects one cricket at a time, but across a whole field over a season they add up, and they're part of the normal nutrient cycle that keeps soil healthy.
Cricket frass as fertilizer
Frass is the gardener's word for insect droppings mixed with shed skins and leftover food. Cricket frass is sold as a natural soil amendment and fertilizer. It contains nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium in small amounts, plus organic matter, and the chitin from shed skins is being studied for possible benefits to plant health. Results vary with the source and how it's used, so treat it as a gentle, slow-acting amendment rather than a miracle product.
If you keep crickets yourself, the frass from a clean bin can go into compost. Mix it in rather than using it raw, and make sure no live crickets or eggs go with it.
A thermometer with legs: chirps and temperature
Only male crickets chirp. They make the sound by rubbing a scraper on one wing against a ridged file on the other, mostly to attract females and warn off other males. Like other insects, crickets are cold-blooded, so they chirp faster when it's warm and slower when it's cool.
In 1897 physicist Amos Dolbear published a formula linking the chirp rate of the snowy tree cricket to air temperature, now called Dolbear's law. A popular simplified version goes: count the chirps in 14 seconds and add 40 to get a rough temperature in degrees Fahrenheit. So 30 chirps in 14 seconds suggests about 70°F.
Treat this as a fun rule of thumb, not a weather instrument. It was worked out for snowy tree crickets, and other species chirp at different rates. House crickets and field crickets won't match it closely. It also only works across the range of temperatures when crickets are active and calling.
A sustainable source of protein for feed
Crickets turn feed into body mass fairly efficiently, partly because, as cold-blooded animals, they don't burn energy keeping warm. Studies and the FAO generally report that farmed insects need less land and water, and produce fewer greenhouse gases, than traditional livestock for the same amount of protein. They can also be raised in stacked containers indoors, so they need little space.
The details depend a lot on what the insects are fed and how the farm is run, and the industry is still young. But that efficiency is a big reason insects are being studied as feed for fish, poultry and pets, and as a human food. You can read about the food side, along with important safety notes, in our cooking with crickets article.
Keep pet crickets contained, and never release them
As useful as crickets are in their own habitats, the crickets in your feeder bin should never be turned loose outside. House crickets (Acheta domesticus) are not native to the Americas. Released feeders can compete with native insects and can carry diseases or parasites that spread to wild populations. They can also become a nuisance indoors: escaped crickets chew on paper and fabric and chirp all night.
- Keep crickets in a bin with smooth sides and a secure, screened lid.
- Remove uneaten crickets from your pet's enclosure after about 15 minutes.
- If you have leftover crickets you can't use, freeze them overnight in a sealed container and dispose of them with your household trash.
- Don't put live crickets or unfrozen eggs into compost or the garden.
Our care guide covers housing that keeps them healthy and inside, and the life cycle page shows how they grow from egg to adult.
Small insect, big role
Crickets recycle nutrients, feed a long list of animals, tell the temperature after a fashion and may help feed the future. They're also the backbone of many reptile and amphibian diets in homes across Texas. We raise house crickets in San Antonio for exactly that job.