Creepy Crawlies

At Cracked.com I came across a fantasticly irreverent article about the five most horrifying insects in nature, including the bullet ant, the Japanese giant hornet, and of course, the botfly. There are dozens of varieties of Bot Fly, they're each highly adapted to target a specific animal, they have delightfully descriptive names like Horse Stomach Bot Fly, Sheep Nose Bot Fly and, hey, guess what. One of them is called Human Bot Fly. And since botflies can become lodged into any part of the body, it is not unheard of for them to make their way into the human brain and, well, *feed.* Behold…
It's an odd sort of entertainment: put two bugs in a glass aquarium and watch them fight to the death. Scorpions, tarantulas, huge wasps, mantis, centipedes, and other creepy crawlies are caught on film trying to defend themselves against their opponent. The fight is over when one bug is belly up. They may just be bugs, but I still had a very hard time watching these fights. While I of course know that in nature these bugs will suffer an equally 'horrible' end, under someone's shoe, eaten by a bird, etc, there seems to be something grotesque about filming the death of any creature for the…
I'm a huge fan of artistic expressions which gets inspiration from the natural world, which is why I was absolutely floored by these beautiful clockwork insects created at Insect Lab by Mike Libby. These clocks are made from actual dead bugs; tiny clockwork gears and spings are worked around the shiny carapaces of beetles, the furry exoskeletons of tarantulae, and the delicate wings of butterflies. The inspiration for creating these tiny frankenbugs came when Mike found a dead intact beetle one day. After locating an old wristwatch, and thinking about the simplistic, precise movements of…
Getting stung by insects hurts, and some hurt (a LOT) more than others. Of course, this necessitates a 'sting pain' index by which to compare the aftereffects of meeting the business end of a stinger. Why, just last weekend when i was on an ill-fated canoe trip (I dumped out twice, in freezing water) and was stung by a particularly unruly bee, I was remarking on how useful it would be to place my excruciation in the context of other nasty bugly-bites. Lucky for all of us, an entomologist named Justin O. Schmidt decided to take one for the team and let a lot of bees, ants, and wasps sting him…
A parasite called Toxoplasma gondii has a unique mechanism to help it spread: "tricking" rats into delighting in the smell of its predator, cats. This is an important adaptation since this parasite can only sexually reproduce in the gut of cats, so the parasite needs to get the infected rats into the cats' gut. Yeah, the cat eats the rat, and the parasite lives happily ever after. Normally rats have a strong aversion to the scent of cat urine, but infected rats completely lose their aversion to cat pee but retain all their other fears and phobias. "Toxoplasma affects fear of cat odors with…
Ever find a bug, hideously ugly and strange, that you wanted to identify? Is it poisonous? Should you kill it, watch it, keep it as a pet? Well, next time, snap a picture of that bug and send it to Whats That Bug! People from all over the world send in pictures of crazy creepy crawlies to the entomologists who made the website their hobby. So, you can see what people have sent in, not to mention a lot of beautiful and interesting pictures of insects. The responses are friendly, informative, and filled with tips to help you learn to live with and appreciate bugs. Or perhaps, you want to jump…