Cannibals have invaded America, but unless you were looking toward the ground, you might have missed the Asian camel crickets hopping by, say researchers from North Carolina State University.

Sporting long, spiky legs -- and a ravenous appetite, including for each other -- the species was first spotted in the country back in the 1800s and now looks to have spread throughout the eastern United States.

"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 NC State and lead author of a paper about the new cricket findings, said in a news release. "We don't know what kind of impact this species has on local ecosystems though it's possible that the greenhouse camel cricket could be driving out native camel cricket species in homes."

The paper, "Too big to be noticed: Cryptic invasion of Asian camel crickets in North American houses," is published online in the open-access journal PeerJ.

The research grew out of from a chance meeting between biologist and bug, when a cricket taxonomist found one of the invasive crickets in the home of an NC State researcher.

That got the local scientists wondering how common the species had become around the nation, so they tapped in to their citizen science network, connected through the online forum, YourWildLife.org, which is led by Rob Dunn, an associate professor of biological sciences at NC State and co-author of the paper.

The researchers put the question to the public if they know of any camel crickets, also known as cave crickets, living in their homes.

A majority of those who responded -- about 90 percent -- indicated they were apparently living with greenhouse camel crickets, or, Diestrammena asynamora, which are different from the camel crickets native to the Southern states and long believed to live mainly in, as the name implies, greenhouses.

The researchers also took samples from the yards of 10 homes in Raleigh, North Carolina, and indeed came across large numbers of camel crickets.

They also discovered the area is inhabited by another type of camel cricket.

"There appears to be a second Asian species, Diestrammena japanica, that hasn't been formally reported in the U.S. before, but seems to be showing up in homes in the Northeast," Epps said. "However, that species has only been identified based on photos. We'd love to get a physical specimen to determine whether it is D. japanica."

The researchers have assured homeowners they needn't panic if they come face-to-(er)-antennae with a camel cricket or two.

"Because they are scavengers, camel crickets may actually provide an important service in our basements or garages, eating the dead stuff that accumulates there," said Holly Menninger, director of public science for the "Your Wild Life" project and co-author of the paper.

"We know remarkably little about these camel crickets, such as their biology or how they interact with other species," he said. "We're interested in continuing to study them, and there's a lot to learn."