Is it molting or about to eat me?

Factual Questions
1

Ok,

I got a couple dozen large crickets from the pet store as usual earlier today. You know, to feed my … leopard geckos. That’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

Anyways, two of the crickets turned out to be… something… either injured, horribly deformed, molting or mutating. I took pictures! They were both fairly large and still moving although seemingly missing body parts (or exoskeleton shells of body parts, hard to say, I was too busy being creeped out to figure it out). I didn’t feed them to the geckos simply because whatever it was it was in no condition to put up a fair fight… or at least as fair as you can muster if you’re an intact cricket trapped inside a 20 gallon glass tank with two, relatively large predators.

The pictures are here: http://www.carrietech.com/insectoverlords/

The pictures are rather big so I thumbnailed them.

Any entomologists in the house? What was going on with them?
Thank you,

Groman

2

They are in the process of molting. They have only partly emerged from the shed skin. They are still soft after emerging, and the new exoskelton has not yet hardened. They appear to have molted from the last nymphal stage into the adult stage (because the emerging insect seems to have full-sized wings). As far as I can tell they have all their body parts, they just look odd because they haven’t hardened yet.

Did they continue to emerge? If so, they should shortly harden into a normal-looking adult cricket.

Freshly emerged crickets are in the same stage as a soft-shelled crab, so that the geckos might consider them a treat.