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Today I set out to clean my lizard’s enclosure. Being a thoroughly boring process, I got to observing the crickets left at the bottom of his cage. They were, as one would expect, following the age old rule for “not very smart” animals: up is out. To empty out these errant critters, I open the window and tilt the cage so that they can hop to their freedom. Yet, as stated, they simply ran up the glass to a dead end, until I evicted them with a stick.

I’m guessing that this “up is out” behavior is ingrained and therefore not learned. Taking this further I thought it would be an interesting experiment to set up some sort of cricket house in which the beasts have to climb down through something in order to eat, and thus those that wouldn’t do so would not reproduce (because they would die of hunger: not very nice).

Likely the first few “batches” would only have a few bretheren to make the crawl and survive. After a few however, wouldn’t it make sense that, since all the live crickets would have been breed from ones who defeated “up is out”, the “clan” would have no problem navigating a structure where they would decend to eat?

Just wondering…