Discover Top Posts Tagged with #cave cricket

Tell us more about the Spricket Dungeon? I'm admittedly morbidly curious now

A lot of people have a spricket dungeon in their basement. Sprickets, or "spider crickets," commonly called cave crickets or camel crickets, are cave adapted (trogloxene) fauna and have been living alongside humans (also trogloxenes) for probably tens of thousands of years. The oldest known illustration of an insect is of a cave cricket, carved into a bison bone in France somewhere between twelve and seventeen thousand years ago.

While harmless, a cave cricket is like if a water buffalo were the size of a blueberry and could subsist entirely on mold and autocannibalism. So any dark and humid place where you might find a hint of mildew or dust seems sufficient to sustain a breeding population, and if they somehow end up in a sterile environment, cave crickets can live for months without any food at all. Roaches get all the credit for being nature's most indestructible vermin, but I think cave crickets are equally likely to withstand nuclear apocalypse, especially considering their tendency to live deep underground.

My old house's spricket dungeon was a crawl space under the stairs where we kept snow shovels, paint cans, and bicycles. There was a lot of debris in the closet when we first moved in, and I suspect us cleaning it out was what started the crickets' slow population decline. My housemates and I occasionally caught them or laid down duct tape traps, but mostly the crickets stayed in their artificial cave and only one or two would venture out into the rest of the basement each day.

Stomping on them was out of the question. Not only did it seem too violent, it was also deeply unpleasant to imagine popping them like grapes underfoot. Additionally, those fuckers are fast. I mentioned this in my last post, but their primary defense mechanism really is launching themselves at your face, and it's very effective. Imagine if the water buffalo the size of a blueberry could jump three feet in the air, and it was pissed.

It didn't usually disturb the crickets if you opened the door to pull out a bike. They were mostly carpeting the far wall of unpainted cinderblocks. But if you turned on the closet light bulb, they often started hopping in every direction, and their fat bodies thumping against the linoleum made a hollow 'pop' sound similar to a popcorn kernel in a paper bag. Now imagine dozens of them doing that at once in your direction.

Over the thirteen years we lived in that house, my housemates and I saw the population of sprickets dwindle to about a dozen, but we rarely went more than a week without seeing one. They're much less common in the house we moved to a year and a half ago. We see perhaps one small one a month, rarely any bigger than a skittle, and significantly more timid when not surrounded by an entire cricket metropolis.

I don't particularly want to share my house with them. But they are kind of an inevitability in most human homes, as they have been since we were living in caves. So I do try to regard them as fellow cave dwellers with as much awe and kindness as I can muster, whether I see them in my basement or in the Appalachian karst.

#caves #bug #cave cricket #story time #birdhouse

was curious how much Tetra weighed

it would appear that Tetra weighs 2

my beloved horrible scavenger cave horse

#bugs #insect #cave cricket

Tw: Gross yucky bug

Hi, y'all know I love bugs right? Like obviously I do I still wanna go into forensic entomology and I think all bugs are great

Excpet for one...

CAVE CRICKETS

For those who don't live in ye old mountains like I do, these long legged freaks mostly come out during the winter here and are very attracted to moist and damp areas, so for my home: MY SHOWER

So picture one of those being in your shower the second you're stepping in, absolutely disgusting

Like I said, love bugs. Not these guys. I don't kill them obviously but I hate moving them cuz they'll hop

#vi rambles #Bug talk #cave cricket #And like I don't hate many bugs #But these things along with #Ticks #bot flies #And-#Kissing bugs #Are the only ones I actively despise

Cool bugz in a cave

#bugs #caves #cave cricket #millipede

i never posted this here. one of my favorite wacky cases of dimorphism, but when i first encountered this species i thought that he had suffered from a bad molt, and that led me to find “nutcracker” crickets from the genus Pristoceuthophilus

those grooves on the males aid in both fighting and copulation from what I read on a study, quite literally putting competitors in a vice grip