Over the last few weeks I’ve been plagued by hordes of what I assume are your garden variety crickets (pictured above). While the one if the photo is pretty small, I would say they probably grow to about three times that size, assuming I don’t kill them first, and kill them I do. Lately it seems that a whole bunch of these infernal buggers have found their way into my ceiling, and they can certainly make quite a racket >_<. I’ve been quite tempted on occasion to toss a “bug bomb” in the ceiling and get rid of them permanently. However, I’m quite partial to having a ceiling over my head, one that is not on fire that is. On some nights I might splat 10 of these things in a single night while they’re hopping around my apartment trying to find some dark and obscure corner in which to camp and annoy the hell out of me. Also, because my ceiling is always dark this seems to confuse the crickets in there, so I will often hear them at all times of day. My solution thus far is to empty half a can of Raid/Doom/Target/etc. (whatever I have on hand) into the ceiling. This will usually shut them up for the rest of the day.

While on the subject of critters, this is what I spotted cruising around my apartment the other day:

It seems I also have quite a spider problem since I murder spiders on fairly frequent basis. This one pictured above is of the Platyoides genus (not sure which species and I don’t really know my spiders), more commonly known as a scorpion spider. Google is decidedly unhelpful when trying to find some more info on this thing. Either way, it looks like it’ll hurt if the thing bites me, so I decided to test some theories about matter occupying the same space at the same time.

Fortunately another warm weather critter that hasn’t made an appearance in force yet are mossies. Hopefully they stay away for a long time yet.

Also, it’s been a while since I’ve been visited by a Parktown Prawn, so no photos there. Given that I live just down the road from Parktown, I do get them hopping around my apartment from time to time. Here’s a few choice quotes from the wikipedia article for the Parktown Prawn:

The Parktown prawn is one of the larger insects found in Johannesburg homes. A large specimen may grow to be 10 cm or more, with long whip-like antennae extending to 5 cm.

A large specimen can jump more than metre high.
The strong exoskeleton of the Parktown prawn makes it exceedingly difficult to kill. They are able to function for a short time when decapitated, and are less susceptible to insecticide than most other insects^{[citation needed]}.

The Parktown prawn is renowned and feared for its ability to jump long distances when threatened (they tend to jump towards you).

I fondly recall my first encounter with one of these genetic aberrations. At the time I was watching something on my PC and was being bothered by some random clicking noise in my apartment. Upon turning my light on I quickly discovered what the noise was. It was the carapace of one of these ghastly creatures hitting my tiles (apartment is tiled right through) after a jump. I can attest to the fact that they can jump over a metre high, as I was visited by one of those massive 10cm monsters that was doing exactly that. While wiki has a clichéd [citation needed] tag against the invulnerability of these things, I can recall quite clearly trying to use a ton of insecticide to make it stfu. In the end I had to pulverise it into a smear with my shoe; which I might add was no easy task either.

Lastly, my finger was the only thing I had handy for size comparison when taking the above photos. Maybe I’ll upload a pic of my finger next to a R5 coin or something.