How to Tell the Age of a Cricket
Crickets are small insects that live in the fields, and which might migrate into your home for the winter. There are many varieties of crickets, which are different from grasshoppers despite, and it can be hard to tell just how old the bugs are. However, if you have a common house cricket (or field cricket, the names are interchangeable) then there are some definite signs you need to look for in estimating the age.
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Instructions
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Look at the cricket closely. Fully developed males will have two long extrusions and the female with have three of them, as well as fully developed and functional wings. Crickets who haven't developed these body parts are what are called nymphs; baby crickets. They remain nymphs from hatching out of the egg till adulthood, roughly a 12 week period.
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Try and find molted or shed skins. Crickets molt when they morph from nymphs into adults, leaving behind a cracking shell of their former carapace. These molted skins, and the presence of cricket calls, suggest that the crickets are adults, and older than 12 weeks old. Adult crickets will live roughly two to three weeks past becoming adults.
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Look at the number of offspring that a cricket has. If you can observe a female cricket closely she will lay roughly 100 eggs in her lifetime, with an average of five to ten eggs per day. If you can count the number of eggs that the female has laid in total then you can figure out, roughly, a range of days since she's become an adult. There isn't a similar model for adult males however, just that they're somewhere past the 12 week mark and before the 15 week mark.
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References
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