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Mormon cricket numbers down
RENO, Nev. (AP) - State officials are encouraged by a dramatic drop in the size of Nevada's Mormon cricket infestation, but they're reluctant to celebrate.
The insects covered between 750,000 and 1 million acres, about 10 percent of the land infested in 2006, said Jeff Knight, entomologist for the Nevada Department of Agriculture. The crickets were concentrated in Elko County, the Eureka area and a portion of Sparks. ''The numbers dropped off drastically this year,'' Knight told the Reno Gazette-Journal. ''Definitely, the trend was downward, and significantly so.''
The crickets returned to Nevada for a seventh straight year in what Knight describes as the worst such lingering infestation in 50 or 60 years. At a peak in 2005, the crickets infested about 12 million acres in Nevada.
Mormon crickets swarm in groups by the thousands, gobbling lawns, gardens and crops. The insect was made infamous by nearly destroying the crops of Utah's Mormon settlers in 1848. Knight said he had expected the cricket infestation to cover 8 million to 10 million acres this year.
He hopes the drop in cricket numbers signals an end to a problem that has cost about $6 million in state and federal money to fight. But Knight warned that drought conditions helped start the current infestation seven years ago, and ''it looks we could be going into the same type drought pattern that started this whole thing.''
Knight and other officials plan to meet to discuss a strategy for battling the crickets next year. He said he doesn't want to risk dismantling a system established to combat the insect based on a single year of diminishing numbers.
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