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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