Can crickets chew on fabrics or wallpaper?

House crickets and camel (or cave) crickets both have functional chewing mouthparts, and they will feed on wool, silk, cotton, linen, rayon, furs, and wallpaper paste when given the opportunity. The detail extension sources emphasize is that soiling drives the behavior: fabric marked with body oils, perspiration, or food residue is measurably more attractive to a foraging cricket than clean fabric, which is part of why a stored, worn sweater is a more likely target than a freshly laundered one in a sealed bin.

This is surface grazing, not the internal, tunneling feeding you see in genuinely destructive pests. A cricket scrapes at the surface rather than boring through or hollowing anything out, which caps how much damage any individual insect can do regardless of how long it's present.

University of Maryland Extension states the calibration for this question about as plainly as an extension source ever does: unless dozens of crickets are present, the damage is usually so minor it goes unnoticed. That's the honest reason this page lands at cosmetic and overstated rather than anywhere close to a genuine fabric-destruction verdict — a single cricket, or even a handful, simply doesn't have the numbers to produce anything you'd notice without looking closely.

Most crickets found indoors are wanderers from outside — field or house crickets that came in through a gap and, absent a breeding population, die off from the mismatch between indoor conditions and their normal outdoor life cycle. That's a very different situation from a genuinely established indoor population, and it's the more common one by far.

The one scenario where this crosses from trivial to genuinely noticeable is a damp, undisturbed basement supporting a breeding camel-cricket (or cave-cricket) population. These crickets are strongly moisture-dependent, and a large population sustained over a season can produce surface holes in stored fabric or cardboard that superficially resemble clothes-moth damage — which is exactly why the two get confused in casual observation.

The distinction matters because the fix is completely different. Clothes moths require heat treatment, freezing, or laundering of the affected garments themselves. A camel-cricket population is solved by drying out the space and sealing the entry points that let humidity and crickets both in — the fabric damage stops once the environment stops supporting the population, not because the fabric was treated.