I was sitting here, wasting some time on the Straight Dope, as I do every morning before buckling down to work. I stood up to get some coffee, and when I turned around, what should greet me but a two-inch long centipede, waving it’s icky tentacles. It knew I would be grossed out. It knew that it was the only bug that could make me scream “EEEEEK!!!” So I grabbed one of my sandals, you know, the cute black strappy sandals I kicked off next to my desk last night, and smashed it on the wall, creating this radius of centipede goo around the bug. I HATE centipedes. Can’t stand them. I can find a nest of spiders, and not freak out. But centipedes? EEEEK! Ick! Yuck! I feel like I need a shower now.
Potato bugs give me the heebie jeebies. They’re large, mutant bugs whose heads are disproportionately large, and they move so slowly that it makes them seem even more evil.
Jumping bugs don’t bother me. Flying bugs don’t bother me. The bugs that creep me out are the one’s that have the option to jump or fly. Like grasshoppers. I never know if they are going to jump on me, or fly into my hair.
I HATE roaches of any variety, escpecially the ones that fly!! :eek: . And in the early part of the summer they are everywhere around the outside of my house. eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwww!!! Sometimes they get into the house, but the cats sort of torture them to death. (Nothing is more fun than finding parts of roaches all thru the house)
I have the pest control people come and spray once a month and that helps a lot, but still.
Not sure of the name of my favorite hated bug. I see it every year when I go camping in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area up near the canadian border. Its brown and looks kina like a grasshopper but fatter and has these two enormously long antanae. It can also fly and has a hell of a painful bite.
Anyways, these thing fear no man. I destroy as many as I can when I’m up there. When you crush them, its like stepping on an aluminum can. CRUNCH!
Palmetto bugs, aka American Cockroaches. Very common in Florida - I didn’t know smaller roaches even *existed * until I visited some states a little further north.
These suckers are huge (forget finding roach traps that fit them), they fly, and fear very little. Turn on the light and they’ll stare belligerently at you… or worse, decide to charge (they enjoy crawling over bare feet, you see).
I’m still creeped out by having sprayed one when I was a child, only to have it fall into a metal bowl high on a shelf in the garage where I had to listen to its amplified death throes for several minutes. And let’s not even talk about unexpected swimming dates in the pool or shower.
No other bug can freak me out like this. Silverfish and centipedes just annoy me and spiders… well, I’ve had a wolf spider pop an egg sac at my feet before and that was no problem - rather comical, actually (“Why was that spider carrying a sack of dirt… the specs of which are now moving, OMG!”). I’ve run head-first into banana spider webs more times than I care to recall while in the woods. But palmetto bugs… ugh, ugh, ugh!
Then you don’t want to live here in central Virginia as I am at present! Out here in the woods, during the humid months, I’ll find one or two centipedes on the carpet downstairs every day – but my next door neighbour has to regularly use a shop vac to hoover up a bucketsworth every day from his basement and around the edges of his downstairs room :eek: :eek: :eek:
They’ve got a beautiful house, well built, but these nasty things just get everywhere in the summer and heat – when I move the sheeps’ water bucket the barn floor underneath writhes with them.
They don’t gross me out so much as just annoy me.
When I was little, though, we had some forested land on our property where I played constantly, and I used to run through this one path that was bordered by long needled pines, lovely wee trees; when I ran past, I would brush against them, as they overhung the path. Nice, until one day I realised the ‘pine needles’ had come off – turns out there was some sort of infestation of these long, thin green catepillars, one per frond, and I had them in my hair, down my shirt, everywhere. Hysterics don’t begin to cover it.
Funny, bugs used to set me off more as a wee Boods…I had a similar react at age 6 playing in a corn (maize) field, and coming face to face with a cornstalk just covered with Japanese beetles…
None of them bother me in the least bit anymore except to annoy me if something gets in the house. I haven’t had any experience with roaches, for which I am eternally grateful, and I hope I never will, though.
I hate silverfish. I hate picking up a book and a bug comes out of the binding. ::shudders::
SPIDERS. I HATE spiders. I especially hate wolf spiders, because they are furry and large and they JUMP at you, and if you step on them before they jump it is like stomping on a mouse.
The copy shop I work at is plagued with “waterbugs,” which are JUST LIKE cockroaches but a lighter shade of brown. The true cockroaches here are pretty small, but the waterbugs are the size I associate with cockroaches: an inch or two long. They live in the stockroom, because they eat paper. I hate going back there. And I’m always finding pieces of them ground into the carpet when I’m cleaning at night. Just a head, or a thorax. It’s awful.
Those potato bugs are truly nightmarish. Another one on Fear Factor that completely freaked me out were the African cave spiders. Holy crap, those things were awful.
But for me, the truly most horrifying bug is the Praying Mantis. I can’t stand its tiny head and long standing-up body and how it seems to be rubbing its spiky hands together in eager anticipation of the doing the evil deeds it has planned. EW.
Gross!!! Dammit, and we were thinking of relocating to Virginia! Well, that’s out.
When I was little, I used to work in a cornfield detassling the stalks. I would come home with cornworms (basically little maggots from ears of corn) in my hair. I would run around the house screaming until my mom held me still and picked them all out. Oh, it was so nasty. But it can’t hold a candle to the ickiness that is a centipede. Yuck. Blargh. Euch.
Being another Floridian, I have a large variety of bugs to choose from-
but the worst is …
GIANT DISGUSTING YELLOW GRASSHOPPERS :eek:
These 3-4 inch monstrosities give me the complete willies. When they are small black grasshoppers I stomp to death every one I can find so they don’t grow up to be freaks of nature. Grasshoppers have no business getting that freakin’ big.
I’m so misunderstood.