A Nevada town is fighting a plague of blood-red, cannibal crickets with snowplows to shove the swarms off roads

• Hordes of red-colored Mormon crickets are taking over a small town in Northeastern Nevada.
• One woman said she saw the bugs in their cupboards and their food supplies.

As hordes of Mormon crickets swarm a small Nevada town, local residents say they've found the creepy crawlers all over their houses and yards and local crews are using snow plows to push the disgusting critters off the roads.

"You're opening your cupboards and finding them in your food," Mackenzie Gonzales, a resident of Elko, Nevada, told local NBC outlet News 4.

The Mormon crickets have been crawling over Northeastern Nevada for the past few weeks, Meg Ragonese, Public Information Officer at the Nevada Department of Transportation told Insider in a statement.

Ragonese said "small bands and pockets of crickets" started congregating on state highways two-to-three weeks ago. Over time, the highway crews have seen heavier concentrations of the insects on highways near Elko.

As the pockets of bugs grew larger, the NDOT had to use snow plows to clear the roads of the blood-red crickets and then had to sand the highways, made slick by a film the crickets left behind.

The NDOT has also erected signs on the highways to warn drivers to take caution of the swaths of insects and the slippery roads, Ragonese said.

Ragonese added that there were "no major cricket concentrations were seen on Nevada highways yesterday, June 20."

Still, Nevada entomologist Jeff Knight told the Associated Press he predicts the Mormon crickets will hang around Elko until at least mid-August.

Residents were left reeling after tens of thousands of Mormon cricket eggs, once buried an inch beneath the soil, began to hatch in May and June, the AP reported, leaving behind a stench so horrible the town smelled like burning flesh.

The cannibalistic crickets have been showing up everywhere — from highways to the bottom of shoes, and from hospitals to gyms, according to the AP.

As soon as they die, their comrades rush to eat their carcasses.

One resident reported that when they walk around the small town, all they can hear is the "crunch" of bugs beneath their feet, News 4 reported. When the packs of crickets move, one resident told the AP it sounds like rain.

Northeastern Nevada Regional Hospital even employed a Cricket Patrol made up of part-time workers who were tasked with constantly clearing the hospital campus of the Mormon crickets so patients could more easily enter the building, the AP reported.

Knight told the AP the "bands" of crickets can range in size from five acres to hundreds of acres and that the size of Elko's current invasion isn't out of the norm.

There have been four invasions in Knight's time working for the Nevada Department of Agriculture.

According to Knight, this year's group hatched late, but they will still mate and lay new eggs in the soil. The male crickets die after they mate, while the females die after they lay their eggs, Knight told the AP.

The new generation of crickets could hatch as early as next Spring, but may also lay dormant for up to 11 years, waiting in the soil until a drought which would wake the eggs, prompting thousands to hatch at once, Knight said.

"Then we can go almost 10, 15 years without hardly seeing any," Knight told the AP. "From about 2008, we hardly had any crickets, until about 2019. "