My friend and I were discussing what bugs we find the ickiest, and it made me wonder what about bugs is exactly scary. If you had no concept of bugs being poisonous, would black widows still give an :eek: reaction?
For us its a toss up between spiders and centipedes. The worst are spiders that are particularly fond of jumping/pouncing on things. They’re usually hairy little suckers with big googly eyes. Also very scary is when the little bastards rear up at you.
We’ve encountered spiders that showed almost territorial behavior, standing in a doorway and rearing up, waving their front legs threateningly at us when we approched. I’d rather not kill them since I’d rather have them around to eat the other bugs.
Mantids can be scary. One of them took a swipe at my hand when I moved it too close to it. Little guy looked/acted quite viscious.
Roaches could be the size of bulldogs and they just wouldn’t affect me the way spiders do. Bugs in general do not “bug” me at all but a spider makes my blood run cold. Hate 'em worse than snakes.
I find spiders mildly scary but fascinating. They look clean and efficient. Camel crickets, on the other hand, just look oily and deformed. Cockroaches look oily but at least the shape looks normal for a bug.
Larval forms of lepidoptera pretty well do me in (major worm phobia here).
Adult forms don’t bother me, but I once had a rather unsettling experience. I was catching birds up at High Point State Park, NJ with a bunch of mist-nets. A large tabanid fly got entangled in a net and a friend, Tadhgh, who was catching mosquitoes around the nets, tried to get the fly out. I tried to help by holding the net away, but I lost my grip and the net “poinged” away from us. This caused the fly’s head to be ejected from it’s former body by several meters into the woods. You’d think that not having a brain would be detrimental to flight, but the fly (or at least the body) took off. Tadhgh found it, and tossed it up to see if it would still fly. The headless not-quite corpse flew straight for me. I took the only option of any reasonable adult - I ran off down the trail, screaming like a two-year old.
If it’s just appearances we’re talking about, potato bugs are pretty damn horrible.
In fact, in an attempt to find a picture for you, I discovered that the loathing of the potato bug is so universal that someone has actually created potatobugs.com with lotsofnightmarishimages
For me, Pretty much any of the hemiptera; many of them have those microscopic hooks on their feet, so that wne they land on you, you just can’t shake them off (not that they mean you any harm, well, most of them, they just won’t let go and it freaks me out).
You people have not met the ‘Parktown Prawn’ found in the northern half of South Africa (a fact I am thankful for everyday). Have a look at this beauty. While it is a type of cricket, it ain’t no top hat wearing, umbrella wielding songster. Rather these things are known for their aggressiveness (which is actually just the prawn trying to jump and escape but they hiss while doing it) and their seemingly indestructible nature.
I grew up in western Michigan, and there is a bug native there that I haven’t seen since I left. It is locally called a pinchingbug, a black beetle about an inch long with pincers on the head about 1/2 inch long. Those buggers hurt if you find one in your shoe in the morning! Any entomologists reading who knows the scientific name for this bug, please check in. My wife doesn’t believe they exist.
Every now and again, these critters seem to have a population explosion in our area. They can be spotted in their hundreds all over the outside walls, the fence planks, and of course anywhere damp. They clog my watering can and and drop onto your head when you walk into the shed.
Many times we have been sitting on our patio, minding our own biz and the vile creatures have crawled into our shoes, and bit/stung/whatever they do, our feet. If you happen to sit on a canvas deck chair and there’s one underneath, they jab you in the ass as if you have no right to sit there.
The first summer we were in our current house, they had a banner year. It got to the point where we actually got used to having these things hitch rides into the house in our clothing and hair. We pulled back the covers to find one scurrying around in our bed once. They’ve crawled over my hand on the mouse as I’ve worked at my computer, crawled up my leg as I sat on the “throne”. I learned to pull the scrunchy off of my ponytail before I went inside, and shake my hair out, more than once dislodging an uninvited passenger.
I second scr4’s nomination of the camel cricket. I was reduced to a sodden whimpering mass the first time I saw one. They look like evil mutant spiders with way too many legs. shudder
And the ones I’ve seen have been huge! 3 inches in diameter, maybe. They can jump at least 2 feet high, and they’re fast, too, which makes them very hard to kill. I know they’re harmless, too, but I can’t live with something like that in my house, and their speed makes them impossible to catch for release outdoors.
Absolutely centipedes. No other bugs bother me in the slightest. I actaully have a certain fondness for most creepy crawlies, biut centipedes, I just can’t stand. I hate the wriggly, skittery way they walk. Creeps the hell outta me. Especially the long-legged ones that sneak into bathtubs. Yuckity-yuckity-yuck!
God, what an awesome sentence. And words to live by, really.
For me, it’s anything with more than 6 legs. If it has 6 legs, chances are it won’t bother me (unless it moves freakishly fast-- that’s scary). My most hated bugs are spiders and centipedes, but the all-time winner of the freaky bug is the thousand-legger. We have the little… buggers living in our basement and it seriously wigs me out.
