Bri and Katee

I'm hoping these are in the correct order. The cricket/cicada/grasshopper on the table, we get loads of them most of the year round. The are about 3 inches long.

The horrid centipede thing, we've only had a couple of these about 6 inches long, first one dissapeared into a crack I was about to fill with expandable foam-it got an early grave the rest usually get splattered with the back of a spade.

Then we have the poor little gecko, this little guy had got himself stuck in the airvent, I prised it open and he scurried inside. We have loads of these and encourage them, they seem to do a grand job of keeping down pests like mossies, flys and ants.

angiescarr

I'm a real Gecko fan:-) There appear to be several types. They call the little grey/ grey brown ones Salamanquesas around here, but appear to be a bit more nervous of the larger yellowish ones and I've been told they bite. Anyone know anything about them?

bil

That's a grasshopper type.

Crickets are far rarer, generally speaking.

Cicadas belong to a completely different group of insects, and have a radically different body shape.

jackytoo

In 15 years in Spain I saw a few nasties in the garden, large spiders too. Loved watching the preying mantis. Never had anything in the house aside from what the cats brought. Last night UK was having a read in bed, window open. Suddenly there was a loud buzzing noise and some brown horrible thing like a cockroach was slamming itself all over. I froze at first then it landed on bedside table OH was asleep when I screamed, he said I gave him palpitations he managed to catch it and throw it out. Looked as if it would need a sledgehammer to kill it.

Looked on google and I think it is a Cockchafer!

bil

To the best of my knowledge, there are two types of gecko, the moorish ones that are all over the walls, and a smaller, more rounded ones that have a claw on the end of each digit and are called hemidactylids.

I suspect that what you are seeing are simply the young and mature specimens of the moorish ones. The young are quite pretty, almost chequered with light and grey, while the adults are aggressive (they don't hurt if they bite) and more yellowish grey.

They young ones are right to be nervous as they make a good sized snack for the adults.

bil

There's some big old beetles fly around. I liked the horned ones that come out when it's raining, or afterwards. They squeak if you pick them up.

Found one once, and absolute monster shaped like a VW car, brown and about 2.5 - 3 inches long. Also found another that was I suspect, a click beetle, but instead of a drab brown, this was as tho it had been carved from an opal.

Dick Dasterdly

There are lots of those giant cockies in the Canaries.
They do fly once in a while and scare the crap out of folk by landing on their arms or shoulders.
I helped out in a bar and they were strongly attracted to the beer slops in the basura nearby.
It was like walking on gravel when I took the rubbish out on a night, crunch, crunch, crunch, underfoot.

Only place I saw them on the peninsula was near Salou, where one was waiting to greet the girlfriend in bed one night,... shock, horror.
At the same hotel I watched one climb from ground level to almost the top of the seventh storey before falling of and crashing down onto the concrete below.
I thought thats the end of that, until a few minutes later it came back to life and flew off.