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A species of crickets, known as Mormon crickets, are running amuck in Nevada. These bugs have cannibalistic tendencies and have been causing major issues for many home and business owners. The bugs, which are technically short-winged katydids, also known as bush crickets, are more like fat, flightless grasshoppers in appearance. They can grow up to two inches long. They can feed on more than 400 different plant types and feed on their own dead. Having such a complicated diet has caused them to “poop everywhere” according to one inconvenienced resident.

Pooping habits aside, the crickets also cause a serious problem on the road.

The bugs have massively infested certain parts of the state, causing them to completely take over certain roads and buildings. A big issue coming from this is that they are being run over in hoards on the roads. Once the once on the roads are run over and dead, more come to feed on the dead crickets. These ones then die from being run over as well, and the cycle continues, leaving behind mass amounts of dead crickets on the roads. Interestingly enough, the dead bugs are creating a sort of oil-slick effect on the roads, making them extremely slippery and dangerous to drive on.

According to an entomologist for Nevada’s Department of Agriculture, Jeff Knight, the weather that the state has been seeing recently has worsened the driving conditions. The piles of dead crickets on the road, when getting wet from the recent storms, have become even slicker. As a result, the state has dealt with a number of cricket-caused accidents.

The Department of Transportation in Nevada has had to step in to take action in order to better clear the roads. They have moved forward with distributing sand and even using snowplows in order to de-slick the roads and clear the piles of crickets off. In addition, the Department of Agriculture has applied an insecticide known as Dimilin to thousands of acres of land in the state.

While the Mormon crickets are nothing new to the area, they have not been seen in Nevada like this in years.

In 2006, Nevada dealt with an infestation on nearly ten million acres of the state. Just five years before that in 2001, Nevada and Utah both dealt with an unexpectedly severe infestation as well. At the time a rancher spoke about how the number of the crickets on his property was so high and they wrecked so much havoc, that he even had much of his stucco eaten off his wall by them.