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Thursday, September 04, 2014

Nightmarish Cricket That Eats Anything Is Now Invading the US

A cricket with a voracious appetite for anything — including members of its own species — is now spreading across the eastern United States with no end to the invasion in sight.

The invader, known as the greenhouse camel cricket (Diestrammena asynamora), is described in the latest issue of the journal PeerJ.

“The good news is that camel crickets don’t bite or pose any kind of threat to humans,” Mary Jane Epps, a postdoctoral researcher at North Carolina State and lead author of the paper, said in a press release.

She was inspired to study the cricket after a colleague experienced a chance encounter with one at home. The cricket was previously known to science, but thought to be prevalent only in its native Asia. It had only been spotted in commercial greenhouses -- hence the name -- but wasn’t thought to live elsewhere in the United States.

Wrong.

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6 comments:

Anonymous said...

wonder where it came from...like the cobra in calipornia.

Anonymous said...

I had these in my house in baltimore 8 years ago and they are likely still there. I doubt they had recently moved in. This is not news to most people and I fail to see the problem.

Just like our unwanted visitors from the Mexico. These crickets simply do a better job for less wages.

Anonymous said...

I always call them sprickets (spider cricket) they are annoying to kill and can jump far and high, so watch out lol

Anonymous said...

If they eat anything, can we send them to DC?

Anonymous said...

I thought these were cave crickets?

Anonymous said...

3 MONTHS ago I had them under my house in the crawl space. I never seen anything like them. I called WOODYS PEST CONTROL and they took care of the problem.