SIDNEY - Consider the Mormon cricket - thumb-sized, bubble-eyed, crunchier than a candy-coated date and, would you believe, a meat eater.

"They've been known to eat roadkill if they're hungry enough," said Linda Senior, research technician at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's, Northern Plains Agricultural Research Laboratory in Sidney. "They need protein."

An amber-colored, 2-inch-long cricket squirmed between Senior's thumb and forefinger. The insect was female, easily identifiable by the long, hook-shaped egg-laying ovipositor at the end of its abdomen. Its teeth, slightly smaller than the fine zipper coils of a cocktail dress, frantically gnawed at Senior's joints until finding purchase in her thumb. The visible divot created by the cricket's bite began bleeding.

The USDA laboratory is a gulag of sorts for the multilegged and tap-rooted adversaries of Western agriculture. It's where noxious plants like salt cedar thrive in greenhouse conditions while scientists devise methods - preferably natural - to kill it. Somewhere in an inescapable vault on this campus, there are parasitic wasps depositing their larvae into the abdomens of unsuspecting wheat stem sawflies. Later, the offspring will hatch from the sawfly's guts, bursting through the host's epidermis like the children of some alien invader in a science fiction movie.

It's all part of the USDA's plan to combat plant and insect pests with natural enemies while using smarter farming practices to reduce infestation risks. Pesticides also come into play, but the overall goal is to take an integrated approach. Combined, the above methods are known as integrated pest management.

Lessons from laboratories like the USDA's in Sidney are then imparted to the field, where private agronomists like Neal Fehringer use them to produce better crops. Thursday, Fehringer was searching the muddy barley fields near Shepherd for cereal leaf beetles. The beetles are an imported European pest first detected in Montana in 1989.

"See that slit? That's the cereal leaf beetle," Fehringer said, studying a 2-inch-long hole in the flag leaf of a tender barley plant.

This time of year, the quarter-inch-long cereal beetles are chewing elongated slits in the upper leaf surface. Soon the beetles will deposit larvae in the creases of the leaves. Those larvae then feed on the surface between the leaf veins. Eventually, the plant's ability to photosynthesize will be compromised and the grain quality and crop yield are damaged.

Fehringer's goal is to hit the beetles with pesticide before they reproduce. Plants treated early recover from the experience better than plants treated late. It's only one of the things Fehringer does to manage crops while keeping chemical applications and costs down. Earlier, the barley rows were seeded closer together than usual to shade out weeds. Later, if grasshoppers become a problem, Fehringer will treat the field with granules of poison treated bran, a snack grasshoppers rarely turn down.

Using bran to deliver the poison means using less chemical than when spraying an entire field. Not spraying means not accidentally killing helpful insects such as bees.

Practices like this are often first tested in laboratories. In Sidney, researchers are looking at ways to dust various baits with insect-attacking fungus in order to battle grasshoppers and Mormon crickets naturally.

In the lab, researcher Stefon Jaronski exposes the insects to fungi and then watches for signs of infection. Insects that succumb to high levels of fungus die coated in a powdery green film of fungi.

Here, a bug's life isn't so bad, at least until that staff discovers and delivers a biological death blow.

"We're the biggest consumer of organic lettuce in Sidney because our grasshoppers don't eat anything with pesticide on it," said John Gaskin, supervisory research biologist.

The facility's 1,000 or so Schistocerca americanas, American grasshoppers, chew through a case of organic lettuce each week, Jaronski said.

Mormon crickets, raised in environmentally controlled rooms, are protected even from their cannibalistic selves so researchers can observe their behavior and devise ways to stop the insects from chewing through farm and rangeland in Western states including Montana. Senior has an entire pinned collection of Mormon crickets collected from Lame Deer.

On the opposite end of the research facility, plant scientists are looking for the right insect to kill salt cedar, a thirsty noxious plant that lowers water tables and depletes surface water reservoirs. Gaskin said watering holes used by cattle have been known to disappear because of salt cedar, but they return once the plant is removed. The plant is a European species brought to the Unites States as a decorative shade tree. Researchers are attacking the plant with moths from Kazakhstan, hoping to find a natural killer that could check salt cedar growing in the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge.

Several of the potential plant and insect solutions to pest problems tested at the laboratory come from foreign countries because several of the noxious species do, too, Gaskin said. The foreign species are kept in a lab with special dark-light foyers and air suction at the exits to keep the insects from escaping.

New species of invasive insects and plants constantly cross the country unchecked as decorative plants, or insects hitchhiking on crates or pallets, assuring that research at the Northern Plains Agricultural Research Laboratory is endless.

"There's a large influx of things coming over the border all of the time," Gaskin said, "accidental introduction of things we don't even know about yet."