VISALIA, CALIF. Cricket farm keeps 'em hopping

A family has been raising crickets for reptile food for nearly 40 years.
VISALIA, Calif. (AP) -- As Jon Bassett sticks his hand in a 2-foot-by-4-foot bin filled with 100,000 chirping brown and white crickets, dozens bounce off his arm, elbow and hand. He grabs one without flinching.
"As a child, I didn't have a choice -- before school I had to feed and water the crickets. If we didn't do this, we couldn't eat," he said. "It's like the same thing growing up on a dairy farm -- you get up and help with the farm."
Cricket farming actually is more like raising chickens than cows. Bassett has temperature-controlled rooms and hundreds of grain feeders in bins where the insects' delicate eggs are harvested by the thousands.
The Bassetts got into cricket farming in the 1960s, first selling them as bait to bass fishermen in Northern California. When bass tournament purists felt too many fish were getting fat from eating crickets, the family focused on supplying the pet industry.
"One of the best things that happened to us was the first 'Jurassic Park' movie," Bassett said of director Steven Spielberg's 1993 film about dinosaurs bred for an amusement park. "Everyone wanted a reptile."
Numbers
Now, the Bassett Cricket Farm employs 21 people, and supplies about 120 million crickets a year to pet stores for the nation's amphibians and reptiles.
Reptile and amphibian product sales accounted for $381 million out of $5.9 billion in pet products sold last year. A big chunk of reptile products bought were food, according to a state-of-the-industry report in "Pet Product News Buying Guide."
The Bassetts are one of about 60 insect farmers in the nation and one of a handful who mass-produce crickets and sell mealworms, known as golden grubs because of their wheat-yellow skin color.
Care
In Charles Dickens' "The Cricket on the Hearth," Dickens wrote about a cricket that sings when things are going smoothly and is silent in times of trouble.
In the Bassett farm's concrete chambers, Bassett listens to the roaring chorus of crickets echoing throughout each chamber to make sure they're comfortable -- if it's too hot, they'll chirp even more.
The males make all the noise, rubbing their legs to attract females. They also issue a fighting chirp to repel other males.
Humans share Earth with more than 2,400 species of crickets. The Bassetts breed the brown cricket, which can grow to an inch or two in length. He said he likes the brown cricket because they grow bigger than the common black cricket often found behind household refrigerators.
Feeding
The crickets are fed a variety of grains to prepare them to be meals for snakes, spiders, turtles, lizards, frogs, fish and birds. In the wild, crickets feed on plants, animals, and each other. Bassett loses some through cricket cannibalism, but year-round breeding makes up for the shortfall.
John Shafer, owner of Whitie's Pets in Fresno, buys mealworms and about 3 million crickets a year from the Bassetts to feed his pets and sell to his customers.
People in the reptile industry are unique, he said.
"I think there's a stereotype of a person who has reptiles has piercings and tattoos," he said. "A reptile person is like any of us, but a little bit to the left of the middle. They are the interesting people."