camel cricket

I did a short walk along the Yangjae and Tan creeks, and as I was climbing a set of steps, I saw an old acquaintance:

Camel cricket. Sorry for the blur. Bad lighting and worse photographer.

I just searched my blog to see whether I'd ever written about camel crickets before. Apparently not. The first time you see them, especially if you have the misfortune of seeing them inside your house, you might think they're big, scary motherfuckers, with their huge, spindly jumping legs, their weird, lima-bean bodies, and their freakishly long antennae—all giving the impression of a spider. In terms of how they interact with people and what they do to your home's furniture, camel crickets are, as it turns out, pretty much harmless scavengers. You're better off worrying about the more typical-looking field crickets—you know: the ones that chirp (stridulate) so annoyingly. Field crickets eat everything, organic and inorganic. Leave them on your fingertip long enough, and they'll try to eat you, too. Among the insects that I have no compunction about killing, field crickets rank high on the list. Yes, I admit it: as a junior-high or high schooler, I was a bit freaked out the first time I saw camel crickets, which despite being harmless, do have the annoying habit of proliferating rapidly. While their natural habitat is the outdoors (caves and such), they encroach on civilization and pop up in dark, damp residential basements. It may be unnerving the first time you see a handful of camel crickets already taking over your basement's floor, but since they're largely harmless, getting rid of them shouldn't feel like an emergency. Then again, the site I just linked to suggests that camel crickets, while harmless to humans, can indeed proliferate and leave dung everywhere, and they apparently do eat everything the way field crickets do, so I stand corrected. Maybe I should've killed the little feller.

Are camel crickets harmless?