What do mole crickets eat? Are they harmful to plants?

1. What do mole crickets eat?

It is an omnivorous pest that eats corn, grain seedlings, wheat seedlings, young leaves, vegetable leaves, melon and fruit peels, sorghum, etc. If you are raising them, you can also feed them cooked grains, wheat bran, peanut cake residue, bean cake, etc.

2. Is it harmful to plants?

It is a veritable pest and does great harm to plants. When crops are young, they will bite off the tender stems and eat the seeds. When the crops grow bigger, it will gnaw on the roots and bite them into threads. Therefore, if there are a large number of mole crickets living in the fields, it will be difficult for crops to survive. Once discovered, measures must be taken to prevent and control it as soon as possible to avoid massive reproduction and damage to crops.

3. How to prevent and treat

1. Killing by luring through manure pits: For prevention and control, dig pits about 50 cm deep at regular intervals in the areas with severe damage. Wait until the evening, put fresh cow dung on it and cover it with sentiment. Then remove the grass and kill the fish manually the next day.

2. Kill with poison bait: Dissolve dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane in a proper amount of warm water, then mix it with fried wheat bran. Add a proper amount of clean water while mixing. Make it into poison bait and spread it in the fields in the evening. This will kill mole crickets.

3. Light trapping: It is phototactic. If conditions permit, you can use light to trap it, especially before rain or when the weather is hot and humid, the trapping effect will be better in such an environment.