Colonizing Crickets

Remember the lava flows last summer that consumed 700 houses in Hawaii and covered an area half the size of Manhattan? The disaster held many surprises, but one of the biggest was the first outsider to inhabit the desolate landscape. Spoiler: it wasn’t a plant.

The honor goes to a wingless cricket named `−uhini n−en−e pele (lava cricket). No one knows where these crickets came from or where they went when their work was done. But scientists are eager to know more.

Lava crickets aren’t generalists like most other colonizers on the globe—these specialists appear only on fresh lava flows. They don’t even have wings. They live on bits of rotting vegetation blown in from outside the lava flow and get protein from ocean foam. Then, when the first plants start to grow, lava crickets disappear. No one knows where they live between eruptions.

Biological researchers want to find out how this mysterious Hawaiian native got so successful at such a unique niche. It challenges what biologists thought they knew and shows us more about the ability of animals to repopulate the earth after major destruction and fill new roles after radical changes in the environment. This isn’t a case of a cricket becoming some other creature, but an example of the immense diversity designed into God’s created kinds to do unexpected things in unexpected places.

Such surprises warn us not to rush to conclusions about the limited abilities of the few creatures on Noah’s ark to repopulate the earth after the worldwide flood. God gave his creatures astonishing abilities to adapt quickly to many different roles, including fresh lava on an isolated island.

Article was taken from Answers magazine, July–August, 2019, 20.