Cricket Tales: a game to help understand the intricate personal lives of insects

Cricket Tales is a citizen science project, with the Wild Crickets research group at the University of Exeter. We need your help to understand the lives of wild insects by watching short video clips, and telling us what the critters are getting up to.

The Wild Cricket project is a long-term study aimed at understanding cricket behaviour, personalities and ageing. The researchers have rigged up hundreds of CCTV cameras in a secret field in Spain, each trained onto an individual cricket burrow. This means thousands of videos showcasing the intricate personal lives of the crickets. This footage needs to be watched in order to determine the various events that make up the life story of the insects. Until now, the data has been harvested from these videos by a few researchers spending months on end churning through the footage.