If you have them in your basement, you know it – these large, seemingly spider-cricket hybrids that multiply like mad and have a freaky habit of jumping right at you when you approach. But it took some brave citizen scientists to reveal something new about so-called camel crickets: The variety that lives in our basements is overwhelmingly made up of non-native species.
If these invaders are shown to have elbowed out native crickets, they would be branded full-fledged invasive species – but more research will be needed to figure that out.
Springing Sprickets
Citizen scientists from 23 states, the District of Columbia and one Canadian province answered the call from researchers at North Carolina State University for photographs of basement camel crickets, also known as cave crickets, spider crickets or sprickets.
In nature, these camel-colored crickets live under rocks and logs, but as a houseguest they’re commonly found in damp basements and garages, eating dead bugs and leaves. The pinky-sized camel cricket dwarfs the common house cricket, which is noisy and black. Camel crickets do not make a sound. Their long legs and prominent antenna mean that some people mistake camel crickets for huge spiders. They are completely harmless to humans.
“The only thing about them that is particularly frightening,” says Mary Jane Epps, the post-doctoral researcher who oversaw the study, “is they fling themselves aimlessly in the air when they are surprised, presumably as some kind of anti-predator defense.”
It’s a tactic that has proven effective at scaring the sprickets out of people who are just in the basement trying to get their laundry done.
'Diestrammena asynamora.
