Southern mole cricket

The Southern Mole Cricket (Scapteriscus borellii) is an introduced pest from South America that has been established in coastal and southeastern states since the early 1900s, causing significant damage to warm-season turfgrass in Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. It's a large, powerful insect — adults reach nearly two inches in length — with heavily armored front legs built like shovels for digging through soil. The body is velvety brown and cylindrical. Unlike most turf insects you'd encounter, mole crickets are audible: adults call from soil burrows on warm spring nights, producing a repetitive, low-frequency chirp.

Damage comes from tunneling through the root zone, which physically dislodges turf, severs roots, and creates raised soil channels visible at the surface — similar in appearance to mole tunnels but at a far smaller scale. Adults and nymphs also feed directly on roots and underground stems. In heavily infested turfgrass, the soil surface feels like a sponge from below-grade tunneling, and turf pulls up with minimal resistance. Bermuda grass and other warm-season species are the preferred hosts.

Here is what I'll tell you honestly about Middle Tennessee: I have seen mole crickets exactly once in my years of treating lawns here. That single case was on a Bermuda grass lawn where the owner had brought in plugs of a specialty shade-tolerant Bermuda hybrid from out of state. My strong suspicion is that the mole crickets arrived in that planting stock — contaminated plugs from a region where mole crickets are established. This pest is not native to Middle Tennessee and is not commonly established here. The I-65 corridor is outside the core range for Scapteriscus borellii.

If mole crickets do show up — from contaminated sod or plugs — the bee-safe insecticide chemistry I use as a standard part of the treatment plan covers them. They're in the category of insects that feed on or tunnel through the plant root zone, so the same preventive application that handles white grubs provides coverage. But I'm not going to tell you this is a pest you should be worried about in Columbia or Spring Hill. Watch-and-wait, and call me if you're seeing tunneling that looks different from mole activity.