When nature grosses you out

hee hee hee!

Okay, I’ve seen that picture before, and it’s a bit of a scam. They’re holding the thing closer to the camera than the guy is – it’s not really that big.
Big enough, though. Yechh.

Or, sure, get all “facty”. Have you no respect for truthiness, sir? You’re on my list!

Okay, yes, I was messing with ya, gigi. It’s okay. They don’t get any bigger than about 6 inches. Puny, really. :wink:

The multiple people mentioning the surinam toad is what makes me love this board. I’ve never met anyone else who witnessed the horror I saw on some nature program years ago. All those babies crawling out of all those holes in the toad’s back. Ugh!

My worst gross out is mold. I have a horrified fascination with the textures, the colors, the variety, but the thought of contacting it, or worse - accidentally ingesting it, makes me want to run screaming for the hills. Slime molds squick me out, too (but they don’t grow in my refrigerator).

In my crummy college appartment I kept finding these odd little bugs by the sink. I traced them to their source. They were living behind a circuit board in the base of my cordless phone on a nearby shelf. There was a whole nest of them. I took the phone outside and beat it on the pavement until they were all gone. I am eternally grateful that I didn’t realize at the time that I had a nest of roaches living in my phone. (I still have the phone, too!)

Oh, that’s it! That’s it EXACTLY!

shudder

Lotus seed pods ever since I saw the “breast rash” thing at Snopes. UNGHHH!!

Somehow that doesn’t do much to ease the ooge. :wink:

Centipedes are another one of my skeeve-outs. There was one on the ceiling of my friend’s living room and I had to run and jump up on her bed ?? She knocked it down and the cat ate it. bleah

whatsthatbug.com , eh? Very useful!

For those of you that don’t like maggots, maybe this will help. When she was a small girl she described maggots as being:

“Just like rice, . . . .with eyes.”

Testy

I think I can top a lot of people here. The link I have doesn’t have a picture, and for that you can be thankful :stuck_out_tongue:

A fish parasite that literally replaces the tongue of its host.
Cymothoa exigua

Eeew. That reminds me of a middle-eastern folk tale in which a djinn eats the tongue of a guy then replaces the absent organ with its own. And that’s only the *beginning *of the horror. shudder

Spiderwebs. They look beautiful, but walking into them in the dark is the worst. Ick ick ick.

Please tell me I am not the only one who (mis)read this word and thought it had something to do with the multiple vagina kangaroo thing from up thread?

Please?
Awww crap…I am aren’t I?

It has a “v”, “g” and “roo” in it!

Dopers, I give you…
The face of the Jerusalem Cricket.

I can say with adequate confidence that I’m very, very difficult to squick out. Rotten cat under the workshop? T’was my job to crawl under there and pull the maggot infested sucker out. Slaughtering sheep for a wedding? T’was my job to hold their necks betwix my knees as my uncle slit their throats. In any variety of rotten dairy product, crawling arthropod, clogged pipe, or medical emergency situations that occur on my residence block full of wusses (read girls), it’s likely my cell will vibrate.

However, the singular activity that I’ve been assigned with that kept my mouth vomit-watery, would have been along a sheep shoot (long open topped isle to vaccinate/medicate/inspect) where it was my job to look for the shamefully miss-named “sun spots” on the ears of our livestock. In essence it’s a cancerous tumour on the ear of the most exposed part of the animal. But they can bugle to the size of a golf ball (generally the size of a marble though). Thankfully they’ve been designed with a weak spot in the centre of the mound, which with enough persuasion will launch a stream of mealy white paste that gathers in a sizable spaghetti-like pile atop your quivering thumbnails, my years as a pimple popping teenager aided me greatly in this endeavour. Did I mention the fragrance? Something akin to chicken fat left on tepid counter for a week. That kept my mouth watering for hours, vomit only fended off with frequent swallowing.

Occasionally I’d get a break from the cancer-pimples when a sheep would’ve escaped “treatment” for an entire season, and the ear would have morphed into a festering, bleeding, throbbing, dirt-covered mass of flesh similar in the size and shape of a banana. That would require the dutiful foreigner to hold it up by the tip and lop it off in an accurate (generally) slash with my trusty orange-peeling knife. A light dusting of antiseptic powder and the sheep was away down the shoot. Surprisingly enough I didn’t find that responsibility nearly as revolting.

tvvat

I clicked on that link once. Just once.

It gets me too. And that toad. In fact now whenever I see something sitting inside of something else I get ooked out. Like small holes in the sidewalk with seeds inside. Awful, awful stuff. I made the mistake of watching “Human Wildlife” on the Discovery Science channel once. They showed this woman’s foot with all these holes in it. And in each hole was a wriggling baby bug. And they couldn’t pull them out, no sir. They had to cover the holes with this thick gel to suffocate them first, then they could pull them out. Things should not be inside others things, it’s just wrong.

Has no one mentioned potato bugs yet? Oh my god. I got one in my hair one time. I am traumatized for life.

OH. And silverfish. How could I have forgotten silverfish? Why do they have so many legs? Is it really necessary? They freak me out so much that I can’t even bring myself to get close enough to kill them. Plus, then I’d have dead silverfish! Ugh!

Two? What the hell? I barely have enough use for ONE.

That said; 'roos can have a baby at foot, one in utero and one in stasis (fertilised but stuck as a zygote), and that’s kinda cool but creepy in a ‘baby-making machine’ sort of way.

See through bird babies and the croft. Yuck.

The time I watched a girl cat being desexed and her very very full bladder with blue veins. It was kinda cool but really gross.

That has to be a US thing; here roaches are massive. Just huge and disgusting and they make really gross noises and AERRRRRRRRRRGGHHH!

I think the cat toe cleaning is fascinating, but I don’t let her lick me after she’s had a bath…

This wasn’t nature, but a “disturbed” woman they portrayed on “Untold Stories of the ER”. She made holes in her arms and legs and made room for many worms to live, one per hole. Just the dramatization of it was quite disturbing. She had named each worm and insisted that they be housed in labelled jars while she got worked on.

I could swear they sell a dried version of that for floral arrangements.

They do. I can’t stand them. I wonder where the phobia comes from?