Devastating Impact

Devastating Impact

It’s a little known fact that cave crickets jump toward that which threatens them. I learned this a few years ago when I spent considerable time hunting the hideous creatures in my basement with a flyswatter. Over the course of a few months, my basement went from a home to a few nymph-sized little fellers to a cauldron of ravenous jumpers ready to devour anything in their path.

Warning: Strong Language in video

They are born in the twilight of the day; the time when solitary bats swoop and dive in and out of the darkness silhouetted in a moonlit sky. They have the sharp fangs of vampire opossums that drip the blood of their victims. They eat their own with no sense of remorse. Their bodies operate as twitchy robotic mechanisms reacting to specific threatening stimuli in surprising and shocking ways. Their hideous, hairy legs are seemingly attached backwards to their bodies as if some perverse Frankenstein experiment went wrong. If Satan were an insect, he’d be a cave cricket.

As I watched the little fellers grow and multiply like rats in a horror flick, I knew I’d have to act. My first attempt was a dismal failure. I’d take my swatter and wade into the basement looking for targets. To my dismay, targets were everywhere-glaring at me with their insidious compound eyes. That’s when I made that most startling discovery. Cave crickets do not react like regular crickets when threatened. Regular crickets flee from the threat. Cave crickets embrace the threat and attack it in a kamikaze leaping frenzy. When they perceive a threat, they uncoil their backwards legs and spring right at it.

The first time I went to swat one of them, it stared right at me and leaped for my throat. I immediately recoiled away from the attack and darted away, but I was immediately attacked by another cricket creature. On and on this horror circus was replayed. Every time I flashed my swatter, I was attacked. Most of the time, they missed thanks to my cat-quick reflexes, but every now and again they struck me and tried to attach to me with their prickly sharp legs. Only quick action saved me from their sharp fangs.

The creepiest thing of all was what happened to the crickets I sent to oblivion. At first it was a bit of a mystery to me. I’d go into the basement, adjust my strokes for the inevitable forward attack and kill evil cricket after evil cricket. Some evenings, I’d knock off twenty or thirty of the buggers. Yet invariably, the next morning, there would be no sign of the dead that I left littering the floor the night before. Then one morning, my mystery was solved. In a corner of the basement sat a really fat cave cricket with its fangs sinking into another large cave cricket. It seems that these most evil creatures are cannibals. They leave no trace of wounded and recently killed crickets. Later I even observed crickets attacking one another live.

My fight against these heartless beasts was no doubt doomed for failure. No matter how many I slaughtered during an evening, the next day there were more. It was like the rats in the old suspense horror thriller, “Willard.” Instead of Willard and his platoons of “friends” invading my house, it was the spawn of Satan, more horrific in my mind than any rats in a movie theater. That’s why I decided that I needed to take the ultimate action. An apocalypse needed to visit them to end their domination once and for all.

I visited my local grocery store and purchased a two flea bomb canisters. Carefully following directions, I set off the bombs in my basement among the mildly suspicious beasts. They watched me blankly as I sneaked in to the room. I thought I could hear them whispering among themselves, their last thoughts. As the canisters began spewing their poison, I took my family and dog and evacuated our house. I didn’t see them writhing and taking their last breaths. Hours later, we returned and aired out the house. When I went to the basement, I found no living cave crickets. They were gone. The devastation was thorough and complete.

That was several years ago. I’ve recently begun to see some cute little cave crickets in my basement...