ORLANDO SENTINEL (Florida) 22 June 10 Jumpin' Jiminy! Virus silences cricket farm (Stephen Hudak)
Leesburg: Healthy and hopping a year ago, Beth Payne's insect-growing operation is so quiet now that you could hear a cricket chirping — if she had any.
Payne, owner of Lucky Lure Cricket Farm, supplied reptile owners, Florida theme parks and zoos with millions of singing insects every month until her Leesburg warehouse was suddenly silenced by a bug of a different kind.
A quick-spreading virus, blamed for destroying similar farms in Europe, wiped out her cricket colonies this year, contaminated her facility and forced the 58-year-old niche business into bankruptcy court this month.
"At first, we thought it was just a bad hatch," said Payne, 53, who scooped 9 million dead crickets from incubation bins in February.
Lucky Lure, considered the state's oldest commercial insect farm, was ravaged by a plague that has cricket farmers justifiably worried, said Drion Boucias, a professor of entomology at University of Florida.
"There's no known cure for this," Boucias said of the aggressive, species-specific virus, which has caused a nationwide shortage of crickets, commonly sold for a dime a bug at pet stores and slightly cheaper over the Internet.
The densovirus attacks the common house cricket, a fish bait and tasty staple for pet lizards and other reptiles, who prefer a live meal with a little spring in its step.
Boucias said the virus, spread by contact and ingestion, is next to impossible to remove.
Cleaning for naught
Payne, who consulted the professor, tried unsuccessfully four times to restart the bug-growing operation, investing thousands of dollars in chemicals and specialized equipment to sterilize floors, walls and fixtures.
"We bleached and bleached and bleached," she said.
Eight people lost their jobs when Lucky Lure, saddled with more than $450,000 in debts, shut its doors in May, forcing a swarm of reptile hobbyists who relied on Payne's crunchy crickets to scramble for pet food.
Experts say there is no evidence that any animal has been harmed by eating an infected cricket.
Payne, who suspects the virus arrived on a tainted shipment of worms from a California farm, tried to keep her business crawling by selling crickets raised by other farms.
She rang up $22,000 in bills for bugs from the Armstrong Cricket Farm in Georgia, the nation's oldest and largest cricket farm. Armstrong manager Jeff Armstrong is so concerned about the virus that he won't accept mail from other farms, fearing the microscopic, contagious bug might have hitched a ride on the envelope.
Several growers and dealers have posted notices on their websites, including Clay Ghann, president of Ghann's Cricket Farm, a family-owned operation that was featured this year on Discovery Channel's Dirty Jobs series.
Georgia-based Ghann's supplies the inch-long critters to former Lucky Lure customers, including the Central Florida Zoo and Botanical Gardens in Sanford. Bearded dragons, poison dart frogs and tarantulas are among two dozen zoo animals that feast on crickets, said Shonna Green, the zoo's marketing director.
Lucky Lure, which also supplied crickets to Disney's Animal Kingdom, Busch Gardens and SeaWorld, began as a bait service in Lake County in the 1950s, serving anglers looking for a low-cost lure to snag largemouth bass and crappie.
Eerily silent
Payne, a mail carrier for nearly 30 years, married into the unusual occupation.
Her late husband, Robert Payne, who died in 2008 at age 45, wanted to buy a bait shop in the late 1980s when he moved to Florida from California, where he had worked on movie cameras in Hollywood. He settled for a cricket farm.
After they married in 2002, the couple decided to set up sales booths at "Repticons," annual conventions of reptile owners. The strategy proved to be a boon for Lucky Lure, said John Legan, 35, the bug farm's foreman.
Lucky Lure, which had been shipping about 50 boxes of crickets a week, began selling more than 2,000 boxes a week to reptile hobbyists across the U.S., prompting an investment in a new climate-controlled building.
A box of 1,000 crickets cost $10.50 to $21, depending on the number of boxes ordered.
The farm shipped 32 million crickets in just six months in 2009 and was poised for 2010 to be its most profitable year ever, Legan said.
He recalled how the winged hordes thundered inside their growing bins, sounding at times like a heavy rain. Beth Payne likened the ferocious noise inside the farm buildings to the pounding of stampeding horses.
But now it's quiet.
"I think if I heard one now, I'd cry," she said.

Cricket virus
What: The densovirus is a single-strand virus that affects only insects — in this case only the house cricket, which is commercially grown in the U.S. as a fish bait and reptile food.
How spread: Likely by ingestion of contaminated material by healthy crickets or deposited on cricket eggs by infected females. Infected crickets die without visible symptoms.
Why occurring: "We're still learning about it," said G.B. Edwards with the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.
Virus silences cricket farm

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