Crickets are common insects, known for their distinctive chirping. While many wonder if they threaten wooden structures, crickets do not eat wood as a primary food source or cause structural damage. Their presence near wood often leads to misunderstandings about their diet and potential impact.
What Crickets Consume
Crickets are omnivores, consuming both plant and animal matter. In natural habitats, they eat a wide variety of organic materials, including grasses, leaves, flowers, seeds, decaying matter, fungi, and sometimes smaller insects or other crickets when food is scarce. Field crickets eat plant material, while mole crickets consume plant roots. Indoors, house crickets may feed on food scraps, pet food, and various organic debris. This broad diet highlights that wood is not a typical component of their nutritional needs.
Common Misconceptions About Wood
The belief that crickets consume wood often stems from misidentifying them for other insects that actively damage timber.
Termites, for example, are well-known for eating wood from the inside out, creating hollow tunnels and leaving frass or mud tubes.
Carpenter ants chew through wood for nests but do not actually consume it, often leaving wood shavings (frass).
Powderpost beetles are also wood-destroying insects whose larvae bore through wood, reducing it to powdery dust and creating small exit holes.
Unlike these specialized wood-eaters, crickets lack the biological mechanisms, like symbiotic microorganisms, needed to digest wood cellulose. Any minor gnawing by crickets on wood is typically incidental, perhaps due to surface stains or residues, not an attempt to consume the material.
Actual Cricket Damage
While crickets do not target wood for sustenance, they can damage other household items.
Their feeding affects fabrics, including natural fibers like cotton, wool, silk, and some synthetics. Damage often appears as small, irregular holes or frayed edges, especially on items soiled with food stains, sweat, or laundry starch that attract them. Crickets may chew through these materials to access residues.
They can also damage paper products such as books, wallpaper, and cardboard, often attracted to starch in glue or organic material in paper.
Houseplants are another target, with crickets feeding on leaves, stems, and flowers, particularly in gardens or if they enter homes.
This damage is generally aesthetic, not structural, and typically occurs when cricket populations are high or preferred food sources are scarce.