Goodbye Mormon cricket, hello praying mantis—Utah's insect neighbors are bellwethers for change. 

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I was startled. A praying mantis materialized in the flowers, inches from my hand. I was watering with a hose, and the big bug made its way gingerly up a nearby fence to escape the water.

The mantis paused now and then to swivel its triangular head to get a look at me. I watched it tiptoe up the slats of the fence.

It was an unprecedented sight. Growing up in Salt Lake City, I don't remember ever seeing a praying mantis, let alone one the size of a popsicle stick. Mantises are not native to Utah—I think they were imported along with ladybugs and nematodes as organic gardening gained in popularity over the years.

What I remember from long-ago summer nights were bugs swirling about porch lights like kindergarteners at recess—a gaggle of moths, mayflies, mosquitoes, lacewings and dime-sized beetles we called "June bugs."

I haven't seen a June bug in decades. That realization triggered such other of my bug-related memories as:

—Vacuuming up a swarm of carpenter ants as they poured out of a nest inside a bathroom wall.

—Sleeping under a net to keep malarial mosquitoes at bay.

—Driving into a wide swath of Mormon crickets crawling across Highway 50, east of Ely.

—Pouring gasoline into a yellowjackets' underground nest in a flaming, night-time assault.

—Watching fireflies spark in unmowed fields on hot, humid nights.

—Suffering the bites of New England's springtime triumvirate: black flies, no-see-ums and mosquitoes.

—Bombing lairs of black widow spiders with firecrackers.

—Mulling the advice of a bed-bug exterminator to cover theater seats with a plastic bag before sitting on one.

Memories aside, it is apparent to me that there aren't nearly as many bugs congregating at porch lights as there were when "Meet the Beatles!" topped the record charts, many years before mountain pine beetles ravaged Utah's forests. I don't rule out the porch light as a bellwether that registers either the influence of climate change or the cumulative effect of insecticides—or both.

My mother—a sweet, garden club mainstay—poisoned snails, killed aphids and emptied countless aerosol cans of insecticide to kill any spider she encountered. Only the ubiquitous daddy long-legs were spared.

In retrospect, she was an unapologetic agent of what Andrew Van Dam called an "insect apocalypse." The Washington Post data columnist analyzed 20 years of Google searches, "seeking an unfiltered glimpse into what Americans are trying to kill." In the bug category, ants, fleas, flies and bed bugs topped the hit list. Utahns sought information on killing black widows, earwigs, grubs, wasps and grasshoppers, he found.

No surprise to find grasshoppers on the Utah list. Battling infestations of grasshoppers and Mormon crickets is a well-known subtext of the Utah story. Only the Willie and Martin handcart disaster of 1856 is more salient. As a descendent of pioneer immigrants, I know that eradication of crop-denuding crickets has been viewed as an existential imperative. To save their crops, my forebears in Sanpete County drove crickets by the thousands into brush-lined ditches and set fire to them.

Less familiar are details of Native Americans' interaction with the thumb-sized bugs. To them, "Mormon" crickets were as much a culinary windfall as manna was to the Israelites. The Utes and other Great Basin tribes roasted them, ground them with seeds and ate them.

But eating crickets evokes Utah's most famous story of all—the 1848 "miracle" in which a providential flock of seagulls scarfed enough bugs to save 900 acres of pioneers' crops. A statue on Temple Square memorializes the event for Mormon faithful, but to my mind, the seagull intervention is best viewed paradoxically.

To the pioneers, the crickets were a threat to their crops; to native peoples, the bugs were a windfall of protein-rich food.

The Native Americans had taught the Mormon settlers to forage for the Sego Lily roots that Brigham Young called "a heaven-sent source of food." That John the Baptist's wilderness diet included locusts with wild honey got short shrift from Brother Brigham, as the prophet was known. Nonetheless, the pioneers' time would have been more profitably spent laying in a winter supply of insect meal than spending days drowning, burning, burying and clubbing the swarming native bugs.

Since then, the spread of such non-native insects as spotted lanternflies and gypsy moths has generated its own stories.

Nineteen years after the miracle of the seagulls, gypsy moths were introduced into New England from Europe. They were well established in Massachusetts by the time I moved there in 1975, so I witnessed the population of gypsy moths explode in 1981. A scourge of millions of caterpillars laid waste to New England's trees, defoliating most of the oaks on 12 million acres before the frost.

I remember walking in a forest and hearing what I thought were rain drops landing on the duff. The sound was actually the patter of caterpillar droppings raining down from the overstory. There was such a plague of caterpillars that railroad trains stalled on uphill grades, the wheels having lost traction in the ooze of crushed caterpillars coating the rails.

The invasive moths have since expanded westward year by year—so have the mantises. The spotted lanternflies that are taking a toll on New York's vineyards? Also heading this way. Perhaps the handwriting is on the wall, readable in porch light in Salt Lake City.

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