15th December: Day of the Cricket

In the French Revolutionary Calendar, today is the day of the Cricket. Here are 10 things you may not know about these insects:

1. There are over 900 species of cricket, belonging to the family Gryllidae.
2. Not all species of cricket chirp. Those that chirp do so by rubbing parts of their wing covers together. It is usually only the males which make a sound.
3. The chirping species also have good hearing. Their eardrums are located on their front legs.
4. Crickets are found all over the world, except at latitudes 55° or higher. They are most common in the tropics. In Malaysia, for example, 88 different species can be heard chirping from near Kuala Lumpur - and it's anyone's guess how many of the mute species were present as well.
5. The higher the temperature the faster a cricket will chirp, and their is even a law describing the relationship between rate of a cricket chirping and the temperature - it's called Dolbear's Law. According to this law, counting the number of chirps produced in 14 seconds by the snowy tree cricket, a species common in the United States, and adding 40 will approximately equal the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit.
6. When baby crickets hatch, they are about the size of a fruit fly. Then they go through ten larval stages before reaching adulthood.
7. The largest members of the family are the bull crickets, Brachytrupes, which are up to 5 cm (2 in) long.
8. There are a number of superstitions related to crickets in various parts of the world. A cricket chirping, especially inside a house, is in various countries seen as a sign of impending rain, a financial windfall, illness or death. In Brazil, a black cricket in a room is said to portend illness; a grey one, money; and a green one, hope. In China, crickets are considered very lucky and are sometimes kept as pets. Cricket fighting is a traditional Chinese pastime that dates back to the Tang dynasty (618–907).
9. In Vietnam, crickets are seen as a tasty snack when they have been soaked, cleaned and deep fried. It's thought that the food efficiency of crickets could be as much as twenty times higher than that of cattle.
10. Crickets are popular characters in fiction. A talking cricket features in Carlo Collodi's book, The Adventures of Pinocchio, and in the film adaptation he gets a name, Jiminy, and becomes Pinocchio's conscience. Charles Dickens's 1845 novella The Cricket on the Hearth is divided into sections called "Chirps", and tells the story of a cricket which chirps on the hearth and acts as a guardian angel to a family. George Selden's 1960 children's book The Cricket in Times Square tells the story of Chester the cricket from Connecticut who is taken, along with the family's other pets, to see Times Square in New York.