What wildlife freaks you the fuck out?

[Exy]

I was watching a spider crawl up my bathroom wall tonight and it occurred to me that I don't mind spiders in the slightest. Spiders are our friends, they eat insects and don't really fuck around with me in any way. I don't know, maybe it was exposure to Charlotte's Web as a tyke but spiders just aren't scary.

Which made me reflect on what is truly scary. Which is centipedes and millipedes. For example, house centipedes (Scutigera coleoptrata), those horrible fucking things that probably live somewhere in your house just like they do mine:

God how I loathe all those things. They have more legs than any righteous being could possibly have. Centipedes and millipedes and a couple other groups of horrible many-legged things belong to subphylum Myriapoda, which is a subphylum I think all right-thinking people would be happy to say goodbye to. And the fuckers are both fast and tough -- way fucking harder to kill than spiders.

What horrible kind of wildlife would you like to see humanity erase from the earth? What freaks you the fuck out? No linking those youtube videos of gigantic centipedes eating mice, please. I already have to check for them under my bed every night before I go to sleep as it is.

[Hatshepsut]

I'm not keen on earwigs.

[OtakuLoki]

Actually, I don't mind millipedes. They're bumbling, not too fast, and above all: Non-venomous. Heck, they're even mostly vegetarian, as I recall.

All centipedes, on the other hand, are predatory, venomous, and just plain mean, as well as having far too many legs. ewww...

[PapSett]

Ticks. Just typing the word makes my skin crawl.

[Rube E. Tewesday]

Naked mole rats.



Just the thought of those creepy little critters skittering around under the ground, on the same planet I live on, fills me with unease.

[Myglaren]

Slugs and woodlice.

[Exy]

I had to look up "woodlice" to know what you were talking about -- huh. Turns out that's the more formal term for roly-polys/pill bugs.

[Orual]

Opossums.

This is the face of evil, people:

[Cluricaun]

Naked mole rats.

Frankly I'm surprised that these were named something completely different, like dirt scrotums.

I'll refrain from linking pictures, but I'm terrified of human parasites. Guinea Worms, tapeworms, brain flukes, schistosomiasis, that kind of thing. Just thinking about them makes me want to go take a long bath.

[eleanorigby]

I am freaked out by the manner in which snakes move. No, I don't want to see a video of it, thankyouverymuch. I also don't like how they smell with their tongues or whatever. I don't want to annihilate any of the wildlife I dislike, I just don't want anything to do with it.

I am also freaked out by wildlife in inappropriate places. Yes, I know my bedsheets aren't recognized as such by an ant, but it still freaked me out this morning to find one crawling on me. It still raises the hairs on my arms.

Opossums are quite bizarre close up--and they can be scary looking if you don't realize one is in the garage with you until you see and feel it run half up your leg and scuttle off...

Slugs are disgusting.

Scorpions also freak me out. Something with the tail. And crocodiles/alligators. I used to think that they were under my bed and only came out at night. They would get me for sure unless I could land ONLY on the throw rug next to my bed. I had to leap from it through the doorway to be safe (and from the doorway into my bed). I went to bed every night with PTSD.

[Taumpy]

I'm not particularly bothered by millipedes, but I haven't ever encountered one under my bed so that might be why.

Animals that don't bother me in general, but the noises they make freak me out: foxes when they scream and fisher martens making a mating call. Now, those are unsettling.

[Taumpy]

[OneCentStamp]

That naked mole rat looks like an old man's scrote, imbued with an unholy sentience.

[OtakuLoki]

I think I will speak up for the Tasmanian Devil. Not only does their scream really sound like a either a devil or a damned soul crying out - they're also currently endangered because a communicable face cancer is spreading through the population.

[Glazer]

Opossums are quite bizarre close up--and they can be scary looking if you don't realize one is in the garage with you until you see and feel it run half up your leg and scuttle off...

I read this as in the garbage with you. I thought WTF is Eleanor dumpster diving or something.

[artifex]

Jellyfish. I won't go into the water at the beach because I can't see into it - the Pacific ocean isn't as bad, but Galveston is silty as hell, plus the water is really shallow for a long way out and you can see fish jumping out of the water just a little way out. If you go out up to your hips, you'll have fish bumping into you. Fish are bad enough, but I have a dread of jellyfish bumping into me, these living but mindless cartilaginous blobs trailing stinging tentacles. I know they're there - last time we went to the beach, there were beached jellies about every twenty feet - and I just can't bring myself to go into the water knowing they're out there and I don't know exactly where.

[Exy]

they're out there and I don't know exactly where.

And you know they're pretty much transparent. You have no chance of seeing them coming, but they have special cells adapted just to inject you with horribly painful venom. They're pretty much nature's assholes, aren't they?

[OtakuLoki]

They're pretty much nature's assholes, aren't they?

Immortal assholes, some of them.

[RabbitMage]

Basically,



FUCK MANTIS SHRIMP

[OneCentStamp]

Immortal assholes, some of them.

That fills me with a low-grade horror the more I think about it.

Basically,

FUCK MANTIS SHRIMP

I'm not trying to be macho or contrary or anything, but I could easily see myself either keeping that thing as a pet, or eating it with garlic butter. *shrugs*

[Laughing Lagomorph]

...


I'm not trying to be macho or contrary or anything, but I could easily see myself either keeping that thing as a pet, or eating it with garlic butter. *shrugs*

Yeah, the mantis shrimp is actually kind of cute.

There are centipedes in the basement of this place I'm renting. Those suckers are big, fast, and creepy. And they've been known to get up here to where I, like, live.

I read eleanor being in the garbage too.

[Laughing Lagomorph]

Oh, to add my own nominee, cockroaches are just disgusting. The big ones are slightly worse but that doesn't mean the little ones are any picnic either.

[OneCentStamp]

Oh, for my own personal contribution, I will say that I've long thought of the underside of a horseshoe crab as the most skin-crawl-inducing sight in the animal kingdom:

[Cluricaun]

Frankly I'm surprised that these were named something completely different, like dirt scrotums.

That naked mole rat looks like an old man's scrote, imbued with an unholy sentience.

Perhaps we should begin a letter writing campaign.

[Orual]

Oh, for my own personal contribution, I will say that I've long thought of the underside of a horseshoe crab as the most skin-crawl-inducing sight in the animal kingdom:

Are those barnacles? WHY ARE THERE BARNACLES???

[artifex]

Are those barnacles? WHY ARE THERE BARNACLES???

The barnacles freak me out more than the horseshoe crab. Barnacles are fucking gross.

Edit: I don't know if it's that barnacles remind me of Lotus Boob, or the reverse, but either way, man..

[Orual]

The barnacles freak me out more than the horseshoe crab. Barnacles are fucking gross.

Edit: I don't know if it's that barnacles remind me of Lotus Boob, or the reverse, but either way, man..

Oh man, that reminds me: tube worms. ::shudder::

No, I'm not looking for a picture. YOU look for a picture.

[OneCentStamp]

You mean you wouldn't wear this lovely piece of tube worm-inspired jewelry, clearly designed by the collaborative efforts of HP Lovecraft and HR Giger?

[Taumpy]

Mountain lion screaming creeps me the fuck out too. I can't find a good Youtube video of it, but sometimes they sound like crying human babies.

[Cluricaun]

So do rabbits when you just wing them with a .22. They scream just like human babies and it's kind of creepy.

Not so creepy that I stop shooting at rabbits mind you, they're giant goddamned rats after all.

[eleanorigby]

Note to all: I AM NOT IN THE GARBAGE.

At least I wasn't the time I met the opossum. That other time.... let's just say the police were real nice about it.


I also find sloths to be ugly as sin, but they don't really freak me out.

The barnacles growing on the horseshoe crab like some kind of fungus is rather disgusting. So is fungus, come to think of it.

Raccoons mating is an unearthly sound. Raccoons mating in the dead tree located 5 feet from your open bedroom window on a summer night is downright scary. (I guess they were mating. Perhaps they were killing one another. How would I know? I'm not a raccoon).

Oh, and eels freak me out. Really. And water snakes. They swim the way their land brothers move. <shudders>

[Exy]

I'm not trying to be macho or contrary or anything, but I could easily see myself either keeping that thing as a pet, or eating it with garlic butter. *shrugs*

Better go with eating it, since they apparently will break aquarium glass.

The barnacles freak me out more than the horseshoe crab. Barnacles are fucking gross.

There's a technical term for being freaked out by clusters of holes. It's "trypophobia"! I hate things that look like that. (Note: Do not ever Google Image Search "trypophobia".)

[vison]

Frankly I'm surprised that these were named something completely different, like dirt scrotums.

I'll refrain from linking pictures, but I'm terrified of human parasites. Guinea Worms, tapeworms, brain flukes, schistosomiasis, that kind of thing. Just thinking about them makes me want to go take a long bath.

Word.

[Hatshepsut]

(Note: Do not ever Google Image Search "trypophobia".)

Guess what I did!!!!!

If you don't suffer from that particular phobia (I don't) it isn't TOOOooo bad, but it helps to remember that all the pics of holes in human flesh are almost certainly fake. And if you think I'm going to enlarge them for closer inspection so that I can CONFIRM they are fake, you are so wrong. They're just FAKE, and that is that. Okay?

Let's not talk about it any more.

[Exy]

Guess what I did!!!!!

If you don't suffer from that particular phobia (I don't) it isn't TOOOooo bad, but it helps to remember that all the pics of holes in human flesh are almost certainly fake. And if you think I'm going to enlarge them for closer inspection so that I can CONFIRM they are fake, you are so wrong. They're just FAKE, and that is that. Okay?

Let's not talk about it any more.

They are fake, really. People have put together a whole series of images combining lotus pods with the human body, to (for me) terrifying effect.

[RabbitMage]

However for real holes in the human body, you can GIS 'bot fly larvae'.

It grows inside you, eats whatever you have, then leaves without so much as a thank you. Just like a real kid.

[Orual]

There's a technical term for being freaked out by clusters of holes. It's "trypophobia"!

It's so weird that that's a thing to be phobic about. But clearly I've got it - one time I was cooking rigatoni, and when I checked on it all the noodles were all clustered together, standing on end in the bottom of the pot. It caused me to get the freak-out shudders and break out in a cold sweat. (WHY? It doesn't make a lick of sense.)

You mean you wouldn't wear this lovely piece of tube worm-inspired jewelry, clearly designed by the collaborative efforts of HP Lovecraft and HR Giger?

http://cccampbell.net/Symbiosis/Images/09Tube.jpg

Get it off GETITOFF!! AGH.

[Exy]

However for real holes in the human body, you can GIS 'bot fly larvae'.

It grows inside you, eats whatever you have, then leaves without so much as a thank you. Just like a real kid.

no no no no no no no

no no no no no no no no no!

;_;

[Exy]

It's so weird that that's a thing to be phobic about. But clearly I've got it - one time I was cooking rigatoni, and when I checked on it all the noodles were all clustered together, standing on end in the bottom of the pot. It caused me to get the freak-out shudders and break out in a cold sweat. (WHY? It doesn't make a lick of sense.)

Yeah, I know what you mean.

To me it always makes me think of some sort of horrible infestation of bugs or worms or something burrowing around -- that's where I think the horror comes from.

[Orual]

Botflies live in a variety of places, mostly warm and damp climates including throughout Brazil and Chile.

OK, then. Never travelling to South America. The tropics are a hotbed of all things evil and unseemly.

Countries with known botfly encounters:

Afghanistan
Argentina
Australia
Brazil
Belize
Bolivia
Canada - Northern British Columbia, Southern Ontario

... wait. What?

Chile
Costa Rica
Dominican Republic
The coast of Ecuador
Guatemala
Honduras
Hungary
Iraq
Jamaica
Mexico
New Zealand
Panama
Peru
United States

[Rube E. Tewesday]

Botflies are like something I would imagine for a horror story, then ask myself how my mind could even come up with something that repulsive.

(However, I couldn't even have imagined naked mole rats.)

[Marsilia]

I'm going to go mundane and general.

Spiders.

Just today, I jumped three feet back from the door at the bank because there was a teeninsey little spider near where I was about to put my hand. And, the one time (like, nine years ago) that I did a real drug, I had paranoia that a giant spider was crawling around my bedroom as I laid in bed. Good golly, those things freak me out.

[Marsilia]

I'm going to go mundane and general.

Spiders.

Just today, I jumped three feet back from the door at the bank because there was a teeninsey little spider near where I was about to put my hand. And, the one time (like, nine years ago) that I did a real drug, I had paranoia that a giant spider was crawling around my bedroom as I laid in bed. Good golly, those things freak me out.

[RabbitMage]

I don't really mind ants, but I just came home after being gone for several days, and just noticed the wall one foot to my left (the one my bed is up against) is crawling with them. I wanted to take a nap, damnit. :-(

[OneCentStamp]

I don't really mind ants, but I just came home after being gone for several days, and just noticed the wall one foot to my left (the one my bed is up against) is crawling with them. I wanted to take a nap, damnit. :-(

A lone ant is an almost-cute curiosity. However, each additional ant seems to multiply the ick factor. Swarming ants are sheer horror.

[Hatshepsut]

Swarming ants, huh? Okay children, gather round ... Gramma Hattie has a little story for you.

In 1997 I spent a month in Bali volunteering for an environmental foundation. For living quarters, I rented a small open-air hut right along the rice padis. It was quite nice, with its own small kitchen and bathroom on either side of the bedroom.

My first night I cooked myself a simple meal, luxuriated on my porch watching the sunset over the volcanoes, and headed off to bed. Strangely, I slept a bit poorly, feeling a lot of minor stinging sensations from time to time - nothing serious, but mildly annoying.

With morning light, I discovered why. Ignorant fool that I was, I had left some organic garbage in the trash. The ants found it and seized upon this generous new food supply to take back to their nest. The nest, apparently, was accessed through a hole in the bathroom wall. The food source was in the kitchen.

Did I mention that my bed was BETWEEN the bathroom and the kitchen? Those little itchy sensations I'd been feeling all night came from the fact that thousands, and I do mean THOUSANDS, of ants had been marching back and forth across my bed all night. The trail of ants wasn't one or two ants wide. It wasn't even one or two inches wide. No, I think "a foot wide" describes it reasonably well.

I had to get the landlord to come in with insecticide spray and conduct a mass murder and then sweep up the corpses. The sheer biomass of dead ants was truly astonishing. Imagine that five or six ladies with long brown hair went to the hair salon and got short haircuts all at once, and then the snipped-off bits of hair were all swept into one pile. That's what the ant carcasses looked like.

Gramma Hattie is done with her bedtime story, kiddies. You may go to sleep now. Sweet dreams!

[Exy]

:shock:

[Orual]

You know what sounds like a good vacation spot right about now? The Arctic tundra.


Or maybe the Moon.

[OtakuLoki]

Not really disturbing on that level, but shocking all the same were the squirrels at NTC Orlando, where I went to boot camp.

They weren't scared of anything. The little monsters had all figured out that recruits are very tightly constrained in what they can and cannot do, and so their minimum flight distance (the closest you could approach before the animal in question has to run away) was zero.

It was bad enough to have the company commanders (Drill Sergeants are what the other services have.) yelling at recruits for their faults, real or imagined. It was something else to have a couple squirrels following alongside the marching recruits, offering their own criticisms, at their own top volume.

Heaven help the idiot recruit who got out of line to try to punish the furry would-be-khakis.

The first time my company was allowed to go to the recruit Exchange we were told to pick up only toiletries and necessities. Most of the company ignored that order, but a handful of us fell out of the Exchange and into ranks waiting for the rest to finish looking at such contraband as the SI Swimsuit Issue, or candy, or tobacco. We lined up about ten feet from a trashcan on the walkway exiting the Exchange.

After about ten of us were lined up, with the senior man standing out in front of the formation as our leader, a squirrel came to investigate the trash can. It darted past us, without even a look at us, climbed up into the trash can, and then you could see it's tail twitching as it investigated the offerings within. This went on for about 30 seconds. Then the squirrel popped back out of the trashcan, without any treasures, and stalked over to where Hamilton was standing as our POIC. When it reached Hamilton's legs it started chittering, and began climbing up his dungarees. All of us were supposed to remain at Parade Rest - at the risk of punishment if we fell out of that position. So we all struggled to remain silent and in position. Hamilton, himself, was stuck remaining at attention, while still staring down at this unnatural squirrel, which didn't even slow down when it reached his waist - it kept climbing, until it was over his sternum.

Then the squirrel got really loud. I presume it was telling Hamilton that the quality of trash not up to the usual standard, and that it was going to hold Hamilton personally responsible for correcting the situation.

When it was done with this theme, after another minute, or so, it turned around, brushing Hamilton's dropped jaw in the process with it's tail, and climbed back down Hamilton, and went off to where ever the evil squirrels went when they weren't tormenting recruits.

And then our CC found us all helplessly laughing and exchanging looks.


Effing squirrels.

[eleanorigby]

Oh, god, how I laughed at that squirrel story. Thanks.

The ants, however--<shudders>



Leeches are freaky as hell. Homeless snails with an attitude. Bastards.