Great fish bait, but I can't imagine how much fun it is to clean up after driving thru that!
It might be surprising, but there are some dedicated fishermen here in the high desert of northern Nevada. The local newspaper dedicates a whole page to the local fishing conditions, but I have never read or heard that someone was using these shell-backed katydids (Mormon crickets are not true crickets at all) for bait. I'll ask the guy who writes those fishing articles and get back to you!
The first time I encountered the Mormon cricket insectoid horde was last year. I've lived here for ten years and heard about these things, but I had no idea what I was looking at when I first encountered them. Last year I substituted as the process server because out long-serving process server retired. I pulled up to a trailer at a notoriously seedy trailer park on the edge of town, and the whole place was inundated with a skittering, hopping, stinking horde of these really gut-knottingly ugly insects. I was going to have to wade through that to do my job, and i was frankly pretty damn alarmed. My first thought, given the notorious reputation of that trailer park (there was a murder there last year), was that someone had died in that trailer and that the insects were drawn to and feeding on the corpse. I called the Sheriff's Office, got the Undersheriff on the phone, and told him what I was witnessing. I know him well - our Undersheriff is a very affable LDS gentleman - and from my verbal description he was immediately able to identify the infestation I was witnessing. "Oh, it's okay. They're Mormon crickets," he said. "They, they're ours."
It was at that point that it dawned on me that the LDS Church's public relation's department needs a complete retraining.