12th Feb: A new policy is being put in place for TRS threads: If there is no evidence provided in the Opening Post that the page is broken, the thread will be nuked immediately. See Everything You Wanted To Know About Changing Names for what constitutes evidence.
5th Feb: Echo Chamber Season 1 blooper reel on Youtube here
Some animals just make anything better. Others, make anything scary.
TV tropes would like to remind you that the animals listed are just that: animals, not horrible monsters that should be killed with fire. They are also not really after your blood. Except for the blood sucking ones.
Note to All Tropers: Enough with the side conversations on this page, take it to the discussion boards. And make sure your entry isn't already here before you add: there's already a lot of bugs, for instance.
See also Everything's Worse with Bears. And bees. And sharks.
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Extinct
Two Words: ''Tyrannosaurus rex''. To put it bluntly, we're talking about an animal that was 36-42 feet long, 11 feet tall, weighed 6 tons, and had razor-sharp serrated teeth that could grow to the size of a banana. Oh, and it gets even better. The jaws of a T-rex were strong enough to crush bone and are considered one of the strongest sets of jaws known to ever exist in the animal kingdom (Only the prehistoric fish, Dunkleosteus, had a stronger bite). Be thankful it's extinct.
T. Rex definitely was a badass. But it was hardly alone in being Nightmare Fuel Unleaded. See this chart? Yeah, I'm glad those thing's aren't around anymore.
It gets worse. There's now evidence that suggests that T.rex could run fast. So, now you got a 42 ft long, 6 ton predator that may have been able to run up to 20 mph and had bone-crushing jaws.
Everyone, meet Megalania, the gigantic prehistoric cousin of the Komodo Dragon. Again, be thankful its extinct
There have been reports of a komodo dragon like lizard in the Indonesian islands, but 2 or 3 times it's size. It's now a cryptozoological animal.
There once lived a prehistoric crocodile known as Deinosuchus (the name itself means "terrible crocodile") that was estimated to have been 30 to 50 feet long and weighed up to nine tons, with a bite force even greater than T. rex, which ate dinosaurs. Have fun swimming, kids.
What about Dunkleosteus? This big fish had a bite force of over 8,000 pounds per inch (greater than Tyrannosaurus rex!) on the tip of its teeth*
Technically, they're extensions of the jaws, not teeth.
. The worst part? Its hunting tactic was to open its mouth so quickly as to suck in prey moving in due to the pressure change - so you would be sucked into a gape that could chop pretty much anything in half and you wouldn't be able to escape.
It doesn't help that it looks roughly like a Rancor crossed with a gigantic piranha.
Marsupial lions. Ice Age Australia's answer to the Sabre-tooth cats. The biggest, Thylacoleo, was about the size of a large cougar, and could disembowel prey with its claws, and deigned to rip off limbs in favour of snipping them off with its teeth. It also apparently dropped from trees onto its prey. Even scarier, it may still exist.
So wait, drop bears actually existed?
At least they look somewhat cute and cuddly, being cats, still. They aren't as lethal, but having a coconut crab do a paradrop on your head is pretty freakish. Especially if it whacks you with said coconut before hand.
They're not cats. A better comparison would be giant killer wombats (or maybe even koalas) with sickle clawed thumbs. Yes, that's right, marsupial lions come from the "herbivore" side of the marsupial family tree.
They've been gone for a while, actually... we drove them to extinction back in the eighties. At least all you easily-disgusted folks can rejoice now.
Except the Pharmaceutical Industry, who, realising that young frog's ability to supress the digestive fluids of it's parent could've yielded potentially life saving drugs, are not exactly rejoicing. They're offering big bucks to anyone who can capture a live one, which it doesn't look like is gonna happen.
Unless of course, zombie frogs.
Mosasaurs. Enormous, carnivorus, aquatic lizards that hunt in packs. Fortunately, they're extinct now, but they were seriously scary.
Megalodon. Prehistoric shark with a mouth a grown man could stand up in. Extrapolating from its fossilized jaws, paleontologists have estimated it to be around 50 to 60 feet long. A creature that big would probably eat adult whales. And if that wasn't scary enough, if it was anything like its smaller modern cousin, the Great White Shark, it could breach like a whale. Imagine, if you will, a shark the size of a Greyhound bus taking to the air with a whale in its mouth. Sweet dreams....
It's called a polaris breach, for those interested. Great whites aren't the only creature in the sea to do it, but are certainly the most deadly. The last run of Shark Week on the Discovery Channel showcased what seal nightmares are made of.
Of course, the proper Nightmare Retardant for that would be the not-so-classicJohn Barrowman flick Shark Attack 3: Megalodon. Then you will never be able to hear that creature's name without giggling.
One of the nature channels has recently been airing trailers suggesting that Megalodon might actually still be out there. Think about that for a while.
The book "Meg" by Steve Alten is about exactly that. But, in that it escapes and proceeds to rape the oceanic world. With its teeth.
How big were these? They made the fearsome Great White Shark look tiny. They made the not-so-fearsome (but massive) Whale Shark look tiny.
Here's a chart◊ for comparison. The green one is a great white. The red one is conservative estimate for a megalodon.
It is my DREAM to one day bring the concept of 'land sharks' to fruition through a combination of genetics and biomechanics. Just because of the awesome FOR SCIENCE! Rule Of Cool factor. And then immediately live in a Don Karnage-y zeppelin.
You know how museums have that tendency to put animal jaws on the floor and basically go, "Hey, guys, look how easily this thing could eat you?" Well, this one had freaking Megalodon jaws. Looking into a pair of jaws that are about half your size again is...disconcerting to say the least.
Think about it that way: A great white will have a bony meal out of you. For that thing? ''You're a pretzel.'
Speaking of large sea animals, scientists have recently found the skull of a large whale similar to the sperm whale about sixty feet long with tusk-like teeth about fourteen inches long. They were thought to have eaten other whales and the fangs would've ripped out huge chunks of the unfortunate victims. Their given name? Leviathanmelvillei.
It also lived alongside Megalodon. Two giant ocean predators with mouths bristling with teeth, one a lone ambush assassin and the other a pack-hunting determinater. And evidence shows Megalodon and Leviathan preyed on each other.
Dromaeosaurs (better known as "Raptors" to your average person...Ya know, like Velociraptor, Utahraptor, Deinonychus, etc.) are quite terrifying when one thinks about it. Sure, a good number of species are small, but they also have razor-sharp claws and teeth, a pair of huge scythe-like talons on their hind feet, and its been theorized that several species were highly intelligent social predators.
Try most. At the very least Deinonychus, the bugger who inspired the monsterous raptors of Jurassic Park, hunted in packs. And while many people consider dinosaurs to be less bad ass with feathers, well, there is a little something called Wing-Assisted-Incline-Flight or something. Quails use it. It allows them to run up straight inclines. Ladies and gentlemen, we have Spider-Raptor.
There isn't any conclusive evidence of them hunting in groups per se. A group of "raptors" scavenging or mobbing (as opposed to the coordinated group hunting we see in canids) is just as if not more likely. But when it comes down to being ripped apart by a dozen feathered fiends the unfortunate prey item probably doesn't care about the difference.
Speaking of extinct, feathery deathbringers, let me introduce you to the Terror Birds. Basically like a Chocobo except they actually existed. And could probobly rip apart anything they damn well wanted to, including horses.
Jesus, that thing looks like a devil dodo (doesn't seem to be any direct relation, though). And one subfamily is named Titanis, because of how big it was.
Here's a flying menace for you. Meet the Haast's Eagle. This raptor was large and powerful enough to take down moas with ease. And it existed when humans started settling in New Zealand. It was a bird DESIGNED TO KILL PEOPLE.
It gets worse. Much worse. Recent studies suggest that Sinornithosaurus millenii, a small dromaeosaur that lived in Asia, was venomous. That's right, not only were "Raptors" intelligent, fast, and had razor-sharp claws...but now they're poisonous. Oh Crap...
It's said that the evidence is weak on that one, so you don't really have to worry about venomous "raptors". Yet. And, fortunately they weren't as intelligent as some movies show; they couldn't have held a candle in the intelligence department to nearly all modern birds. Also, there were in fact many, many other dinosaurs (including the comparatively much larger Tyrannosaurus rex) that were better adapted for running than the dromaeosaurids. Chances are they could still run faster than you, however. And any cassowary will tell you that you don't have to be the most intelligent birdbrain to be scary... Not to mention, dromaeosaurids may have been good at climbing trees.
Oh yes, and they got big. Look at this size chart◊ for Utahraptor. The green is a conservative estimate of its size.
Sea Scorpions. Can you imagine an amphibious scorpion the size of a crocodile? I can't without getting the willies.
They're actually called eurypterids and not all eurypterids were giants, in fact, most were very small. In fact, we would be eating them if they were still around. You're probaly thinking of Pterygotus.Remember, the small animals always outnumber the bigger ones.
Entelodonts. Take a wild boar or a javelina, and give it steroids. A lot of steroids. Enough to make it the size of a bull or rhinoceros. Now, strip off most of its fur, and change its teeth from that of an omnivore into things designed to shear and tear flesh. And take away most of its omnivorous tendencies. Pure carnivore baby. Not to mention that they were the first animals to develop the traditional artiodactyl-style hoof, which made them incredibly fast. Oh yeah, and they ate rhinos on a regular basis.
Holy shit, Andrewsarchus. Just....Andrewsarchus. It's hard to believe this beast belonged to a family closely related to even-toed artiodactyls (think deer, sheep, and cattle), since its gigantic head alone was over three feet long and it was the largest carnivorous land mammal that walked the Earth. This page from the manga "Eden no Ori" sums up its size quite nicely.
Some paleontologists think they may have been related to the same lineage as whales.
That makes sense. The closest living land relative to cetaceans is the hippo, and look at what a nasty piece of work it is. Kills more people each year than just about any other animal.
Hatzegopteryx may not look physically terrifying, but once you realise some things you would be thankfull things like that are extinct. First of all, it was basically like a giant stork in habits, catching prey with the beak. In Hatzegi's case, a beak longer than the jaws of the largest theropod dinosaurs (aka T. rex had a shorter snout). And that pterosaurs was taller than a giraffe. Considering birds like herons can swallow things as proportionally big as rabbits, and since reptilian (including avian) esophagi are very tough (turkeys can swallow blades and not suffer ill effects), Hatzegopteryx could easily grab a person with the jaws, swallow him/her alive and you wouldn't even be able to fight back, only to find your doom at the digestive juices.
The Tasmanian Tiger◊, which can distend its jaws far beyond the capabilities of those of any animal other than a snake. I am considering a campaign to Tasmania to make sure that there aren't any more alive, because they could apparently swim...
YMMV. I think they're adorable. Maybe it's because I'm local-ish.
Apparently, thanks to advancements in technology, it could be possible to bring the species back. They're attempting this now. You're welcome.
The Permian Extinction. The worst extinction event in the history of earth. The closest life ever came to ceasing to exist all together. Over 90% of all species on earth vanished. It gets even more disturbing when you hear the details. Of all the dozens groups of reptiles, only a handful survived. Synapsids: aka, “mammal-like reptiles”. The missing link between mammals and reptiles. These creatures basically ruled the earth, very diverse. Both tiny creatures, and mega fauna rivaling the dinosaurs and mammals after them. The only ones who survived where tiny burrowing creatures who eventually became mammals. Anapsids: There used to be 100s of different kinds of armored reptiles roaming around. Only the turtles survived. Archosaurs: The common ancestor of birds, dinosaurs, crocodilians, and pterosaurs. Before the extinction they where tiny scavengers. Afterwards they exploded from lack of completion. Lepidosauria: The Ancestors of lizards and snakes. Sphenodontia: The Ancestors of modern tuataras. Of all the Amphibians that evolved since they first left the ocean, only the Lissamphibia survived. Crocodilians where only able to become crocodilians because the giant Croc-like Amphibians died out. Reptilomorphs aka, “reptile-like amphibians.” The missing link, and the most successful group of amphibians at the time, Where completely wiped out. Trilobites: some of the oldest and most successful ocean life at the time. More successful than fish. Completely wiped out. Insects didn’t make it out okay either. All six-winged insects vanished. Their cousins, the non-insect Hexapods vanished, except the wood lice. Fossil evidence shows that for almost a million years after the extinction, the most common form of life on earth was fungus. The icing on the cake? Unlike the Dinosaurs and the massive impact Crater, scientists have NO CLUE what caused it, or if it could ever happen again. There is not a shread of evidence of anything that could have caused it on earth, leading some to theorize it was a local supernova, but the truth is we have no idea.
The current most likely theory is that all the landmasses coming together caused widespread "desertification", quite literally turning vast amounts of what was previously rainforest and swampland into arid, nasty environments few creatures could adapt to. The oceans weren't safe, either; with only one landmass, currents settled and the oceans stagnated. Almost every ocean-going creature suffocated due to lack of oxygen. Other theories include a flood basalt, which is basically a supervolcanic eruption that lasts centuries. There's no word to describe just how insanly nightmarish a flood basalt eruption is. First the name. It causes a litteral flood of basaltic rock over the area it happens. Next how it occurs. Triggered by the massive tectonic stress brought about by a single landmass subducting ocean plates on all sides, a massive chunk of the earth's crust crumbles off and falls into the mantle. This forces the magma upwards to the surface. How big is it? Well the largest volacano on earth today is the size of Hawaii's large island. The Permian flood basalt, the Siberian traps are the size of the continental United States. And the eruption lasted for 100s, if not 1000s of years nonstop. What happens after it's done? Aside from the aformentioned flood of basalt, imagine all that volcanic gas. Now imagine that gas is methane, one of the most potent green house gases that occur on earth. Now imagine not only the sun's heat, but the volcanic heat trapped in the atmosphere at the same time. The allways popular "huge asteroid" is another theory, as is a local supernova. My favorite theory is that the single landmass and single ocean caused the planet to become tidally locked, meaning one side always facing the sun, one side always facing away. The kicker? The numbers don't really add up in any model.
Of course some of the creatures that the Permian Extinction got rid of where pretty scary.
Mammal like reptiles? Here's an image for you. Picture a creature with neither fur nor scales, the jaw of a crocodile with the teeth of a saber-cat. Now imagine it's the size of rhino, and has fully upright legs built for running. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the Gorgonopsids!◊
Reptile like amphibians? You're probably thinking "Come on! What's a frog gonna do?" this guy ain't no frog!
Of course some of the Archosaurs that replaced them were scary too. meet Postosuchus. Best described as a fully upright 15 foot long land crocodile.
The Titanoboa. A snake that grew up to 15 meters in length and, come on, it's called the Titanoboa! So, it's kind of like taking your average boa constrictor or anaconda, whatever, and drilling it up to eleven. Be thankful it no longer exists.
During the Carboniferous era, we had Meganeura, a dragonfly the size of an eagle and Arthropluera, a millepede that's 6 feet long. SIX FEET LONG!
Wow, I'm surprised no one's mentioned Spinosaurus yet! Take a crocodile, give it plenty of steroids, give it a six-foot high sail on its back and put it on two legs. Scared yet? Here's something for you. See this chart? Spinosaurus is red. Tyrannosaurus rex is the purple one.
Luckily, Spinosaurus has it's fair share of Nightmare Retardant. Spinosaurus primarily ate fish, so T.rex would probably kill one most of the time, if they were to fight. It wasn't a super predator like it's often portrayed as.
That said, it is also thought to have taken down medium sized prey as well. So that means it would probably be eating grisly bears if it were still alive. Not to mention this fish it ate could very well have been sharks.
Of course! How could I forget Deinocheirus? Its eight-foot long arm and hand bones were found in 1970 (the creature's name means "terrible hand"). Nothing else from the creature has been found yet, and those arms have been a mystery ever since. If it's any help, their owner would have to be tyrannosaur-sized at the very least.Have a look◊ and make up your own mind about the creature.
If it helps, most scientists estimate that it was pretty much just a very large relative to the Gallimimus.
Therizinosaurus. On the one hand, it was an herbivore and probably wouldn't see you as food. On the other hand...It had 3 foot long claws on its hands which it used to defend itself agaisnt predators.
Carnotaurus. The name means "meat-eating bull". Here's a picture◊. The tiny arms acting as Nightmare Retardant for you? Okay, let me fix that; while the bite force of the Carnotaurus was believed to be less than that of Allosarurus, it's been theorized that they made up for that by beating their upper jaws against their prey like a fuckinghatchet.
Large ceratospians like Triceratops and Styracosaurs. We usually don't think of them as scary due to being herbivores, however, an adult could gore a tyrannosaur to death with those giant horns, let alone a human. Also, ceratospians may have been omnivores, not herbivores.
Stegosaurs. A dinosaur the size of an elephant with a built-in medieval flail and a brain so small it probably indiscriminately whacked anything that crossed it's path. But as bad as Stegosaurus was, it has nothing on the pure demonic nightmare fuel that is Kentrosaurus◊.
I take your hatchet fish and raise it with the viper fish◊. SWEET JESUS, WHY DOES THAT THING EXIST?!
I see your viper fish (and wish I didn't) and raise you a fangtooth◊. It's just a mouth with fins.
I will never be able to look at a lizard the same way after my bio teacher showed us this. Warning: Not for the faint of heart! Monitor
Ugh, you can hear it screaming from within its gullet!
I find ituncannily interesting though. I've always found interesting the way sauropsids (aka birds and "reptiles") ingest prey whole; the monitor didn't even made an effort to kill the prey, when it could perfectly wound it while going down in the throat. Same happens to birds, and I've seen herons swallowing adult rabbits without damage.
There are lots of snakes that do that too. Coachwhips for example, catch multiple mice at the same time, and hold down the extras with their body while they swallow the others alive. It's truly fascinating...
That dog died a few years go. It was blind for quite some time; the joke was that it got its sight back, looked in a mirror and dropped dead of shock.
To be clear, the dog was voted "Ugliest Dog In The World." Before its death, it was a 15-year-old Chinese hairless crested. Its eyes are white becaus it's blind.
The dog's name was Sam, and he was apparently quite friendly despite his monstrous appearance.
Earthworms and parasitic tapeworms (and hookworms). I can't even look at them prior to screaming and running away.
Why are Earthworms scary? Appearances maybe, but they're one of the best creatures out there, helping fertilize soil and such. It even has a digestive system, and respiratory system and circulatory system. It's a pretty humane creature. Tapeworms on the other hand are horrifiying, trying to suck out your nutrients without giving anything back and worst of all, it can GROW 8 METERS LONG IN YOUR VERY OWN BODY!! HOLY!!
Ascaris worms (you know, the ones in your intestines that looked like slimy living pasta, and can actually accumulate as a bolus to be an eldritch perversion against the Holy Flying Spaghetti Monster, and whose eggs are fucking microscopic) turned me into a nocturnal and forced me to take precautions everytime I take a poop.
It's even worse with the Guinea Worm. Seriously, this worm is really a High Octane Nightmare Fuel, every major health organization vowed to push it to extinction.
You see the Guinea worm is native to Africa, the ecosystem that humans evolved in. As such they prey exclusivly on humans, and where thus introduced to other places by traveling with (read inside) humans. The reason Africa's such a nasty place is because it's humanity's natural habbitat, and thus creatures evolved there with humans in mind, where as other continents are nicer because we're invasive species in those environments. While this has led to some good things (the honey guide bird evolved symboitic behavour with humans, it leads us to the beehive, we get the honey, they get the larva), mostly it just amounts to creatures that can kill us. In other words, it's what environmentalists are asking for when they say humans should "live in harmony with nature". Just keep that in mind.
The fact that many people don't know that there's a worm living inside them makes them extremely scary. Parasitic worms were voted the #1 Most Extreme Horror in The Most Extreme series.
Three Words: Human Botfly Larvae. Disturbing and literally sickening to see one being removed: true. Now try not imagining hearing chewing inside your head if you ever discover one embedded in your scalp.
Yuck, what a thick, puffy tongue this fish has... Wait, it's got beady little eyes!OHMYGODTHATSNOTATONGUE!
It may or may not help the OHGODOHGOD factor to note that the isopod doesn't actually make life any more difficult for the fish. Because it sits where the tongue was, the fish can still eat just fine. Still, Jesus God is it creepy.
And then there's this little guy... "Let's go swimming. I insist."
Think about it this way. On the wiki page, it listed fictional parasitic insects, including little old Uroborus and Las Plagas. Imagine what would happen if these guys evolved a little. You have a stomach ache...is it just bad food, or did an enemy dose you with a little...Uroborus.
Well, you'd certainly know if you started growing tentacles yeck... those Uroboros tentacles are all slimey and deadly (goddamn Wesker)
Certain species of snake. Also certain members of the spider order such as Tarantula, black widow, and the trapdoor spider.
That's not Ultron, it's Spinarak. Not scary at all to me. Now if you find one that looks like Ariados...
For me, snakes in general aren't scary (as a matter of fact, I find most of them either adorable or just plain gorgeous), even the poisonous ones. What scares me is their venom, and more specifically, what that venom can do to a person. Some kinds, if they don't kill you, cause the skin around the bite to rot, paralyze and slowly suffocate you or (depending on the nature of the neurotoxin) cause seizures, make your blood congeal in your veins... So kids, if you see a snake in your yard, stay the fuck away from it, and for the love of Christ, DON'T PICK IT UP!
here is a video of an island full of snakes. "one snake for every pace you walk". It doesn't help that they are some of the most venemous snakes in the world.
"ROCK YOU LIKE A HURRICAAAAAAANE!!!!" ...Oh, wait, I think you meant this...◊
Back to spiders - some of them are social, weaving common webs of many spiders. How many can they be? Anelosimus Eximius, for instance, bands into colonies of up to 50 000 spiders. I'll let that sink in.
Think about the things that penguins have to go through when they expect a chick. The mother goes out to find food, leaving the fathers behind to look after the egg and keep it warm, or else the egg will crack and the contents will become frozen solid, killing the baby.
To make matters worse, while the mother penguin looks for food, they are at risk of being eaten by predators such as leopard seals. Sometimes it's not just the mother that gets eaten, but her unborn chick, too! Scared yet?
Some creatures that live in the ocean. The king of them all is the great white shark with its Slasher Smile and vicious nature. Then there's piranhas that can render any living creature- even a cow to a skeleton within seconds (Although they can only do this when practically starved to death) They're still fierce scavengers though. Then there's the anglerfish.
How about the goliath tigerfish? Take a piranha and scale it up to 5 feet long.
Great whites hunt like freaking serial killers, according to some recent studies. This just makes them even more terrifying.
If it's any consolation, most sharks don't like the taste of humans. We don't have enough body fat compared to their usual prey (dolphins, seals, etc.)
"Oh the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear/And he shows them pearly white..."
Here's something. Recently, off the eastern coast of Australia (where else?), fishermen pulled a 3 metre (10 foot) great white shark onboard their boat. That's a good size, as great whites go, but the shark was dead, so that wasn't a problem. What was a problem was that the shark had been BITTEN CLEAN IN HALF BY SOMETHING TWICE AS LARGE. And this is just near a very popular swimming beach. Just have a think about that for a bit. Who wants to go swimming?
I have a cousin whose friend stayed out surfing just a little too long a few months back; they found most of his body later. Strangely, I didn't think much of it until I watched a programme on deadly creatures and found out that, to kill their prey, the shark bites into it and shakes it to bits. Looks like a couple less people are going to the beach today.
On the subject of "Some creatures that live in the ocean," witness this article from The Other Wiki. "The source of the sound remains unknown...it matches the audio profile of a living creature but there is no known animal that could have produced the sound...If the sound did come from an animal, it would reportedly have to be several times the size of the largest known animal on Earth, the Blue Whale." Real-life Cloverfield monster, anyone? Gaaahhhh. I am getting creeped out just posting this.
Just for reasons of balance, this from the same wiki: "An oft repeated claim is that it matches the audio profile of a living creature though this view is primarily held by cryptozoologists and is not popular among mainstream scientists."
This is no longer true. A current look at the article actually has several cited references to an NOAA marine oceanographer saying that it is likely animal in nature...
What gets me is that where the sound was located is very close to where the city of R'lyeh is supposed to be located.
The Cracked article that mentioned the bloop made it Nightmare Retardant for me.
The file that's usually played is the sped up one. Just try listening to it slowed down to realtime. (Large File.) This troper can't decide if that makes it Nightmare Retardant, or if it makes it worse.
The things that go on inside you. Also, "Beauty is skin deep" is a horrible lie if you use a microscope.
The Candiru. According to the page on them in That Other Wiki, Candiru hunt other fish by sensing the urea coming from a fish's gills. The opened urethra during urination is big enough for a candiru to get inside. It can be easily avoided by wearing a bathing suit while in the river. Or by not swimming and urinating in Amazon river at the same time.
What about its relative, the Candiru-Aců? Victims are eaten alive, from the inside out, by up to 100 of the fish. And by 'eaten alive', I mean 'completely hollowed out'.
In an example that might also count as a Tear Jerker, my mother, who grew up on a farm, once told me a story about a horse had that was abused by its previous owner. This owner had a habit of whipping it in the eye. As a result, the eye was pushed back into the horse's socket. The final clincher is that flies would frequently fly in and out of the socket to feed on it. Please note that this horse was, really, really nice.
How the hell did it go through all of that?! Jeez, that thing must be an Iron Woobie.
I read it. It's bad enough that I panic at the sight of a tiny ant on my arm or near my foot (even worse was when a cockroach suddenly burst out of a pin-sized hole in the wall) but all that... I whimpered and twitched and my eyes buldged all as I read every little word and viewed each image in the article. To prevent me from shrieking in terror, I did not watch the videos. Why do I punish myself in this manner?!
I read it, and distracted myself by singing "Pocketful of Sunshine" by Natasha Bedengfield under my breath. And somehow I managed to convince myself that I'll probably never have the misfortune to meet any of these creatures.
For me it is wasps that give me the heebiejeebies. And also those damn mozzies.
Pro-Mole got to hate(and fear) wasps after a Discovery Channel documentary show a kind of wasp that lays its eggs into a cocoon. It's not just standard "larvae-eating-your-insides-alive" cruel, it's practically raping a motionless and defenseless cocoon!
Some wasps are even worse. Known as parasitoid wasps, they will find a live caterpillar, temporarily paralyze it, lay eggs inside the body, and allow them to hatch. The larvae will then take control of the caterpillar by devouring unnecessary organs, modifying its glands, and directly manipulating its nervous system. The host is ordered to do nothing but eat and eat until it's ten times the size of a normal caterpillar. After a set amount of time, the larvae mature and then burrow their way out of the still living animal in order to infect new hosts with their own eggs. The caterpillar has been so infected by the wasp's hormones that even as it's dying it's forced to weave the wasps a cocoon and attack any predators who threaten them. If that won't give you cold sweats, nothing will.
That's 'cause Darwin didn't think it through. The creatures on this page are disturbing to us because our minds are feeble, finite, and most importantly, capable of fear. Without those hindrances, God can, and evidently does, get very creative. We're talking bugs-pretending-to-be-fish-tongues creative.
Of all the things on all the nightmare fuel pages, that one is the only one that is going to give me nightmares.
The TEETH! Holy shit on a stick, the TEETH! And how did they film on the inside of the poor caterpillar!? UGH!
Oh, but it gets better! People all over the world breed these little bastards on special farms and send them out to specially destroy caterpillars that eat timber. That's right. We're endorsing these parasitic monstrosities and having them take out creatures whose only crime was feeding themselves. Do I even need to say it?
I think Szayel was based with the parasitic wasp in mind.
Meet the Emerald Wasp. It doesn't just knock out a cockroach and put an egg on it; it chemically lobotomizes the roach, remote controls it to its nest, rips off its feelers, and then lays an egg on it.
Yellowjackets: Other wasps only eat insects. Yellowjackets eat everything! If you ever got buzzed during a barbecue, it was probably them. And you were probably right to freak out; they have theHair-Trigger Temper of the insect world. Not as bad as Africanized killer bees, but they make up for it by being EVERYWHERE. They are the most common species of wasp in the world. And, possibly, the most intelligent. The freakiest thing? As I mentioned before, they buzz barbecues, because THEY EAT MEAT. They are CARRION EATERS. And unlike other scavengers, being so small, the lack of meat on our bones compared to other animals does not deter them. I read somewhere that there's a certain cycle of insects that appear when a body is dumped in the wilderness. Guess which ones show up to consume thy flesh!
Yep, hornets in Australia too. Helicopter gunships of the insect world, and their reproductive strategy is straight out of Aliens. Even the most diehard arachnophile would be squicked watching a hornet drag a full-size huntsman spider into its burrow. Alive, paralysed and impregnated with hornet eggs.
"It's the size of your thumb and it can spray flesh-melting poison. We really wish we were making that up for, you know, dramatic effect because goddamn, what a terrible thing a three-inch acid-shooting hornet would be, you know? Oh, hey, did we mention it shoots it into your eyes? Or that the poison also has a pheromone cocktail in it that'll call every hornet in the hive to come over and sting you until you are no longer alive? Think you can outrun it? It can fly 50 miles in a day. It'd be nice to say something reassuring at this point, like "Don't worry, they only live on top of really tall mountains where nobody wants to live," but no, they live all over the goddamned place, including outside Tokyo. Forty people die like that every year, each of them horribly".
If you're afraid of the Asian giant hornet, just think about these little guys: I present Apis cerana japonica◊, the Japanese honeybee. Almost cute, isn't it? Asian giant hornets can decimate colonies of European honeybees with ease even though they are outnumbered hundreds of times over, but Japanese honeybees have an interesting defense: they swarm over the invading hornets, to the point where the hornet can't even move, and vibrate their flight muscles, which causes the temperature in the center of this dog- er, beepile, to pass 47 degress Celsius. The honeybees can endure this heat, the hornet cannot. They are essentially roasted alive. It's a CMoA for the Japanese honeybees, and a High Octane Nightmare Fuel death for the hornets.
Pepsis Wasp, aka Tarantula Hawk, so called because it eats tarantulas. Not only that, its sting, while not that hazardous, is so painful, all you can do is lie down and scream.
The stag beetle is so-named for the large, antler-like mandibles possessed by the males of many species. It easily qualifies as nightmare fuel for the same reason. Worse, they're big, some around four inches long. They usually don't harm people, though.
In Japan, they're even collected and kept as pets. If you're not used to insects larger than the size of your thumb, you should stay away. YMMV though.
An even more horrifying creature with comparatively large jaws is the antlion—if you're an ant, since they're not very big. Adults are relatively unremarkable, dragonfly-like insects, but the young are lethal predators that dig pits in the sand, waiting at bottom of the pit to eat whatever insects fall in with their big jaws. If God wanted to write a horror story and market it towards arthropods, I can think of few better ideas.
Playing Sim Ant will put the fear of the antlion into any reasonable gamer. This is a game that includes a spider ten times your size that will chase you down and kill you, and the antlion is still the scariest thing in it.
Want to know something creepier? While they generally don't attack humans, they use hair as nesting materials, so one of the things they do to sleeping humans is creep up on them and snip off locks of hair like some demented stalker...
The goddamn Surinam toad. It's an amphibian that embeds its eggs in its back... and eventually, its young rip themselves fully-formed from their mother's skin. Yeah, it's perfectly natural, but just the thought of it happening to a human being...
GREMLINS! YAY!
Never again will I look at the birth of twins the same way.
I have trypophobia. Thanks for giving me nightmares.
Komodo Dragons. Though they have both venom and septic saliva, they are not believed to play an important role in predation and the idea that they will deliberately envenomate/infect their prey and wait for it to die arose from skepticism from scientists at the turn of the century towards the idea that a mere reptile could dominate an entire ecosystem. The truth is a lot less convoluted. The Komodo Dragon is a cunning ambush hunter that takes down prey with good old fashioned brute force; they're basically land-crocodiles. Though Komodo Dragons have jaw muscles weaker than a housecat's, their teeth are razor sharp and their neck muscles are enormously powerful, allowing them to easily dispatch prey with slashing bites that cause the victim to die from blood-loss and shock within seconds. Smaller prey (such as deer and wild boar) are swept off their feet by a blow from the dragon's whiplike tail, and then seized, instantly killed via thrashing, and are often swallowed whole. To contend with larger prey, such as Water Buffalo, the Dragon will bring the animal down by lascerating its achilles tendon so it can't run away, and then disembowel it. The animal is eaten while it's still alive.
Komodo Dragons have also been known to harass pregnant deer, startling them into aborting their unborn offspring. The Dragon can then help itself to a meal of placenta and tender fetal-meat.
I once went on a trip to a Dragon Island on a tour. A fellow tourist had a nasty cold that resulted in hellish coughs. As soon as he coughed within earshot every single dragon in the vicinity whipped its head around and sized him up. They spot the weak ones in a heartbeat.
Crocodiles. Damn crocodiles. Nightmarish appearance, fast, invisible in a foot of muddy water. Many varieties consider humans to be prey. They can drag you under the water in about two second and eat you. They are intelligent and can learn human routines. They will wait a week to get a bite of you. Those eyes!
It gets even better. Crocodiles are capable of moving twice their body length in a single second. It's not uncommon to hear tales of someone being taken so quickly that you could double-take and miss it. In fact, one story where a famous American model got eaten was usual because they actually had the chance to see it coming.
Don't think it can get any worse? Well, it just did. Meet Gustave, a 22 ft long 2,000 pound Nile Crocodile who is notorious for killing and eating over 300 people.
Oh, and did we mention? He's! Still!ALIVE! That's right, Gustave is still lurking in Africa waiting for his next victim.
There's also the fact that his body is ridden with scars from bullet wounds. Three on his side and one on his head. Not only is he a giant killer crocodile, he's an unstoppable giant killer crocodile.
The Palisades Rathouse might qualify as nightmare fuel. Incidentally it also provides two examples of the Crazy Cat Lady trope who have obsessed over a different animal...
The Mülheim Cobra house! OK, just one cobra, but they literally teared apart the innards of the house, and still couldn't find the damn snake. Volunteers for one night in there please raise their hands!
Sea urchins. Just ... motherfarking sea urchins. They are living, breathing balls of spines which live on the ocean floor. Many of them live close to the shore and it's hard to see underwater, so inevitably some unlucky beachgoers will end up stepping on one. This results in a badly injured foot and a visit to the hospital.
Hey, just imagine if some wacky mad scientists gave them brains...and a hatred of humanity! TRIBBLES OF DOOOOOOOOOOM. Though honestly death-by-urchin can very easily also extend into ridiculous Narm.
It gets worse. Because sea urchin spines are made of calcite, they snap easily because of the alignment of the calcite crystals, leaving part of it wedged in your open wound. The best way to deal with it? Push the spine right into your body. The calcite will dissolve in your bloodstream and the wound will heal normally. Have fun, kids.
The way this is usually accomplished is by breaking off the parts of the spines that are still outside the skin and crushing the parts that are embedded with something blunt and sturdy (a rock works fine if there's nothing else to hand) to break them up and drive them a bit deeper. It's painful, but not completely horrific. However, the ocean being full of living stuff as it is, these kind of injuries do have a tendency to get infected. A good way to counteract that is by sterilizing the injury somehow.
Jaguars. They're both awesome and freaky because they kill their prey by biting through its skull. Their jaws are powerful enough to crack open a glyptodon's skull. And for those of you who don't know paleontology, glyptodonts are essentially mammalian versions of a panzer tank. Google it and see. Do NOT tick off kitty!
YMMV. It may help for you that jaguars are also known to track down and consume the jungle equivalent of... catnip. And thus spend the next few minutes or more acting like they're high on catnip.
It's not quite so much catnip as a hallucinogenic. Jaguars track down and eat the jungle equivilent of LSD.
Big Cats, fierce predators with strong jaws, razor-sharp claws, huge strength (a tiger could knock you unconcius with one swipe of it's paw), super speed and stealth (if a big cat stalked you in a remote area, you wouldn't see it until it was too late). Some big cats have been known to kill buffaloes, rhinos, hippos, pythons, crocodiles, wolves and even bears. To make things worse, big cat attacks are on the rise.
Allow me to introduce you to the Dosidicus gigas: the Humboldt squid, growing up to seven feet long and, alone among the invertebrates, hunting prey in packs of as many as 1200 individuals. Their tentacles are lined with teeth, they feed on each other when wounded or frenzied, they are highly aggressive against unfamiliar objects, they attack humans on a regular basis, and their natural habitat ranges from the Tierra del Fuego to coastal California and spreading north. And you thought it was safe to go back in the water...
Ocean acidification seems to be killing them off, though.
Fun fact, I have an uncle who is a veteran Scuba diver, with well over 5000 dives over 20 years. He's dove with pretty much every single dangerous aquatic predator ever. Great Whites, Bull Sharks, Hammerheads, Killer Whales, you name it. The one creature though he REFUSES to dive with are Humboldt squid. Apparently even divers who are crazy enough to go near them usually wear CHAINMAIL.
Colossal Squid. They have GIANT HOOKS on their tentacles, which they can rotate 180 degrees. And they are up to 46 feet long.
Cephalopods in general. As awesome as I think they are, they are also damn creepy. They're smart. Really, really smart for invertebrates. Most intelligent creatures are birds and mammals, which are pretty similar to us in terms of body structure and biology. But cephalopods are completely alien. The thought of something like that being as smart as a dog is strange. If they would be sapient, what would they think? Most likely we couldn't comprehend it at all. To think modern culture can pervert such beings.....
Fun fact! Cephalopods have one large central brain in their head... plus one smaller brain for each of it's arms. So that's 9 brains for an octopus, 11 for a squid. The (now extinct) ammonites had 12 arms, meaning 13 brains. And then there's the eyes...
I once had to research octopi for a term paper; while they're incredibly intelligent, and the smartest invertebrates, squid are dumb as a box of hammers.
Once again raising the question of what the world would be like if it were designed for octopi and giant squids.
Weird fact about cephalopods: cuttlefish are exellent at blending into their environment by changing their colours to match their background. The thing is, they're also colourblind. How the hell do they know what colour they should change to?
Cuttlefish in general are chalk full of Rule Of Cool. The flamboyant cuttlefish has very poorly developed fins/whatever. So instead of swimming it uses them to -walk- on the ocean floor. The broad club cuttlefish meanwhile will use it's color changing ability to visually stun/hypnotize uncooperative prey. Though octopi generally get the better known as being intelligent, cuttlefish are much more consistent and equally intelligent. They're capable of learning - not just basic behaviourist conditioning (bell rings, do this action) but things like symbolic learning (a plastic tree in the tub means the exit with the stripe [which will change exit between tests] over it is the exit, remember, symbolic learning is the basis for written language). Other species of cuttlefish functionally breed for intelligence; the biggest and strongest cuttlefish will try to regularly mate with the females but the females (who can control which sperm to use) are much more likely to use the sperm of smaller males that manage to mate with them. How do these smaller males get by the larger ones? They disguise themselves as female cuttlefish and walk right in the front door. They have the potential to be the Magnificent Bastards of the sea.
The saga of Rapemouse. If that's not enough, then the various anecdotes of cute animal cannibalism and brutality in the comments will be.
For instance, pulling a spinal cord out of a blood and gore splattered rat cage because that was all that was left, or watching some hamsters playing in a cage except for one that seemed to be sleeping...until one bumped it and the head was all that was there. If you think small, cute rodents are gentler than carnivorous cats and dogs, think again. Life is cheap at the bottom of the food chain, especially when you only live about three years.
Also, the comments mention Reaver Furries, which is about the only thing more nightmare-fuelly than regular Reavers.
Leopards. These cats are like ninjas. They have been know to crawl into houses, kill humans as they sleep, and drag them off into the night—without waking up anyone else.
Despite my finding them actually quite awesome, I'm fairly certain anyone afraid of creepy-crawlies would shit about eighty successive bricks upon encountering a Coconut Crab.◊ In addition to being the largest arthropod on land, they're ludicrously strong. Strong enough to lift 64 pounds and smash coconuts open, in fact. And they can climb trees. They tend to actually shy away from humans, but if you manage to piss one off, chances are you will get hurt. Very, very badly.
Ah there we go, I was looking through for this one!
I inhabited an island where these things apparently live, but I've never seen one (if I did I would probably be scarred for life.)Here's another for your viewing pleasure◊. Crab meat anyone?
Thay actually are supposed to be extremely tasty. They eat nothing but coconuts, which makes their flesh very sweet.
What's even worse is the fact that it takes a flamethrower to kill one.
It Got Worse...again. These buggers may have been responsible for the fact that they never foundAmelia Earhart's body. Some researchers are floating a theory that she ran out of fuel and ditched on a desert island, only to succumb to thirst or hunger at some point. On a History Channel TV special, the team left a pig carcass out for the many crabs on the island...and they showed a high-speed shot of them swarming over the body, which was picked clean in about an hour. Brrrr.
Any number of deep-sea creatures could fall under this, really. Let me show you them.
I feel this is an unfair bias against deep sea life. For in the end, can we not all gain some wisdom from the noble deep sea anglerfish?
Interesting thing about anglerfish. A male or female anglerfish cannot reach maturity on their own; instead, a male (or several), will latch onto the much larger female anglerfish. Pretty much any organ the male has that aren't his reproductive ones atrophy away, and it just becomes a protrusion on the female's body that produces sperm.
Just the sight of the naked molerat◊ is typically enough to unnerve people. Did I mention that in order to better navigate in their crowded underground tunnels, they can turn almost entirely around in their own skin?
No. The most disturbing this about naked moles rats is that there actually exists a species of mammals that live in eusocial colonies.
I happen to love naked molerats (they're cool as), but I suggests that if you want freaky or scary, Google image 'star-nosed mole'.
I love both naked molerats and star-nosed moles. They're so frickin' cute.
I don't like naked molerats that much, but think that the weirdness of the Star-nosed Mole is incredibly awesome.
A good number of invertebrates fit into this trope. I was thoroughly disgusted during an exam in invertebrate taxonomy which involved identifying live specimens. The one that has become burned into the brain was a hideous little asymmetrical thing with ridges going along its twisted curled up body with a number of thin long white tentacles coming out of it in random places. That question was marked wrong because I just couldn't bear looking at it long enough to identify it.
And then there is the Class Polychaeta, belonging to the annelid worm family. The most notorious of these are the sand worms which burrow through the beaches of many coastlines. Segmented worms, up to 3 metres in length, with little moving bristles on the sides of each of their segments, a pair of large eyes that bulge from its front segment, and large jaws that are capable of nipping off a finger. Among the coastlines that they call home: The one that I happen to live near.
The Irukandji Jellyfish, the most deadly jellyfish in the world. Just one brush with this thing will leave you reeling with the effects of Irukandji syndrome, a horrific condition that leaves you suffering not only every unpleasant symptom under the sun, but even a feeling of impending doom so bad that some patients are so certain they're going to die they ask the doctors to kill them to get it over with. And the worst part? THEY'RE SO RIDICULOUSLY TINY THEY'RE PRACTICALLY INVISIBLE.◊
Not quite the deadliest though, some other jellies have stings that can kill an adult in a matter of hours. Irukandji is generally not lethal.
No, they'll just make you wish you they were. "Every unpleasant symptom under the sun" includes excruciating pain in various parts of the body, and wikipedia sez: "There is no known antidote for venom that has already entered the body. Morphine will not help reduce the pain." FUCK YOU, AUSTRALIA! D:
One person even said that'd he would've preferred getting stung by the (infamous) Box Jellyfish than an Irukandji, simply because "either you recover in 20 minutes or you die."
There's an account of an Irukandji victim who was pulled from the surf. After carefully removing the jellyfish remains from the now unconscious man's legs, he was dosed with painkillers and taken away to hospital. Even unconscious and Morphine'd to the eyeballs, he was still screaming in agony the entire time.
COCKROACH.
They don't do ANYTHING, except spread diseases, and be creepy. And live without heads.
Cockroaches do not spread disease. Even the board of health admits there's no proven case of a human contracting any disease from them. They constantly groom themselves and germs don't even stick to them easily. Furthermore, of the 4,000 cockroach species known to man, barely a dozen have the capacity to become household pests, they are highly beneficial in nature, and even the "pest" species only thrive in our homes because they originally adapted to be our helpful symbiotes, cleaning up after us and eating toxic molds. I adore roaches, and I'll defend them at every single opportunity. Fear and hatred of roaches is, in fact, a relatively recent phenomenon and restricted to just a few areas of the world. Many cultures find them endearing, and even English-speaking countries once considered them good luck.
I believe the phrase you're looking for is "They don't do anything for ME".
Roaches spread diseases yes, but at least it's not intentional. I can give them that. One hopes that scientist with the giganto bug-fryer laser manages to take out flies and mosquitoes forever and ever though. Not the creepiest, but certainly the most dangerous insects by a long run.
The problem with cockroaches is, they're too used to living like us. Grooming habits? check. Living in vast colonies? check. Capable of surviving anything? check... Capable of scaring the living piss out of any other creature in their midst? check. They're the only creature that humans seem to be universally afraid of, cause they aren't afraid of us. Unless you turn on the lights.
Plus, they smell. Name another insect that leaves behind slimy nests in your smoke alarms and such. Pantry moths and spiders are downright civilized houseguests.
Actually it's the tiny German cockroaches that are really scary, because you know they're living in your walls and eating your food and breeding like, um, rabbits. And until they invented Combat traps, it used to be, once you saw one, your house was doomed, there'd eventually be German cockroaches crawling out of the peeling paint when you scrape it. The giant, 2-inch scaled up cockroaches aren't as disturbing because they usually don't live indoors, they just come inside for warmth. Except on the Gulf coast where the giant cockroaches live in the house and fly around. Including when you're in the shower.
They may be technically harmless, but that thing about waking up with a cockroach in your ear? Yeah, not just an urban legend. They won't lay eggs in your brain or even hurt you whatsoever if they do it, but do they need to?
That's no joke. I had one die in my ear canal before I washed it out. For two days all other noises were drowned out by a swishy scraping sound of the poor bastard trying to get out...
Couple summers ago, I woke up about 7am 'cause my ear started hurting really badly on the inside. Didn't know what was going on, but there was scraping and major pain inside my ear. After a trip to the ER, it turned out that a pretty freakin' big roach had crawled inside my ear and BEHIND MY EAR DRUM. Took 3 rounds to finally kill it and get it the hell out.
You think they're creepy enough? This morning I found a swarm of them IN MY CEREAL!! Talk about the surprise at the bottom of the box!
I agree that it's horrifying, but have a little sympathy. Inside it's a perfectly normal cat that does just fine. Look at the dogs it lives with: They don't care at all; they know what is really important!
While looking at this can I have difficulties to believe he was not photoshopped. He just looks like a zombie, up to the glowing eye. But I guess it's not. I wonder what happened to it, maybe sprayed in the face with boiling water or something? Anyways, poor kitty. I'm glad that at least he's not in pain, if what's written on the page is true.
The 'glow' is just the flash reflecting off the back of the eyeball; any picture of a cat tends to have that glow and it's why people can have redeye. Incidentally, it was probably a genetic defect as such a condition is possible in humans. Yes, some people are indeed born without a face.
The website says something about an accident, but is vague.
While we're at it, take a look at this. Something about cats.
That is the cutest thing I have ever seen!!!
Tiger and nurse sharks cannibalise their siblings in the womb, eating their way through until they're the only one. Does anyone else find that absolutely horrifying?
Actually sometimes happens with human babies instinctually, though I forget the medical term. Made worse because instead of eating, it's more like ABSORBING.
It's a type of chimerism; one fetus does absorb the other.
Really, the best advice you can give a tourist visiting Australia is that, yes, the rumours are true. If it has less than two legs, or four or more legs, than it can, and will likely attempt, to kill you. Avoid at all costs. Even the cute ones, like wombats and koalas, are vicious up close.
Brainworms... just... brainworms...
The sea louse. It reproduces by having a male draging five or so females into a burrow, impregnating them, and the females contain the eggs inside their body, where the larva hatch and eat her from the inside out. As if pregnancy wasn't scary enough!
Leucochloridium variae is a parasite that specializes in making Zombie Snails. The Nat Geo clip on YouTube doesn't even come close to some of the more gruesome depictions I've seen of this on some nature shows.
I saw a Discovery Channel special on wild pigs in America and how some of them might be descended from imported Eurasian wild boars. They won't eat you, but you would not want to come across one in the wild. And their population in America and Eurasia is spreading.
Domestic pigs are dangerous enough. There's a reason why everyone acted with such concern when Dorothy fell into the pig pen.
The mouth of the sea lamprey. Some people photoshop these onto various body parts and think that it's FUNNY.
That's not the worst of it. They don't have jaws, you see, making them incapable of biting things. Thus, in order to feed, they latch onto the side of a fish and suck out its innards.
Since the sea is really just one giant unexplored part of the earth, we usually find creatures there that seem a little... Off. When I was young, I visited a certain beach a low tide. Walking along the seaweed, I saw loads of fishes, shrimps, sea cucumbers, clams and the like trapped in puddles. But then there was this huge rock that seemed out of place. I came closer and saw that it was covered in holes. Then, all of the sudden, these black eyes perched on black stalks came out of the holes and stared at me, then they quickly retreated. To this day, I'm still looking for that rock.
Perhaps it was a Stonefish? They're very rock-like, and have protruding black eyes. Deadly venomous, too.
Bees (my God) and any similar insect (wasps, hornets, etc.). I have been terrified of them since my mother was stung in the armpit while trying to protect me from one. And Africanized (or "killer") bees, previously unable to withstand cooler climates, are now managing to creep farther north as they become more resistant to cold. Sweet mercy, I hope they never make it to Pennsylvania...
I'm right there with you, man...it makes me appreciate these 5 degree winters...
Three words: Brain eating amoeba.
As in this article on Cracked. It's #1 on the list, and for good reason...
Sacculina. When it infects a crab, it hooks into its shell and spreads tendrils throughout the body. Then it releases feminising hormones, so that even male crabs act like female ones. Then it basically uses the crab (which is sterilised by this procedure) as a puppet, right down to releasing its own spawn when the crab tries to spread its own offspring. This goes on for the rest of the crab's miserable existence, reduced to basically a puppet of a little blob of flesh descended from a barnacle.
The Japanese Giant Spider Crab◊ is the largest of all athropods, with a legspan of 4 meters, weighing up to 20kg and they have a life expectancy of 100 years, which means they actually lived in Ancient Japan.
How can you miss that they are also known as corpse crabs due to their habit of feeding on the bodies of the drowned?
I'm sorry, but any horror that thing would have presented is totally drowned out by the thought of all that crab meat.
How does this section not yet have the golden orb weaver◊ spider? (Warning: click at your own risk.) A spider so large it eats birds. Fortunately, its toxic is not fatal to humans, except possibly when seeing one causes a heart attack.
Surprise surprise, it's Australian.
Surprise surprise SURPRISE, it exists on my island too. It's too widespread to be really AUSTRALIAN, compared to things like the jellyfish and octopodes.
I was talking about that case in specific.
I woke up this morning to find my backyard literally covered in a golden orb's web. I also have one living in a tree in my front yard. I named it Fluffy McPants.
I don't know, all I see is some baby animals playing around. Sure the noise is kind of creepy, but they can't help what they sound like
Dolphins may look all cute, doing flips with their little grins but they can be huge dicks. Males will gang up and rape a female dolphin or harass the calves of other dolphins and whales until they die. I read a story about how a dolphin that lived in a harbour would lure seagulls to the water with fish then drown them just for fun.
And that's just the start. Just check their entry on this list. What's that? They kill randomly kill their own young, just so the mother won't be preoccupied with them and can have sex? Ok, Ok, not as extreme and example as it could be... after all, most animals do that anyway. But then again, only humans and dolphins are known to go out of their way to kill animals just for giggles.
Also, they masturbate with each others blowholes. Y'know, the bit they use to breath n stuff, an equivalent to our noses. Imagine having someone get off by forcing their knob up your nose. just ew.
Makes the insane amounts of bravery seen at Gallipoli(and elsewhere) a bit more understandable, don't it?
Pick up a beautiful shell in any beach except Australia, odds are you'll take it home and make it a nice souvenir. Pick up a beautiful shell in any beach in Australia, odds are it'll shoot a poisionous harpoon at you!
I recently watched a heron snatch a live duckling and swallow it whole. I'll never look at herons the same way again. Imagine how they would look from a duck or fish's point of view; a towering, unearthly thin body, long, spear-like beak, wide, staring eyes... Yeesh, it seems scarier than a T. rex, if mainly for that, long, uncanny neck (predators are supposed to be bulky and muscular-looking, right?) and the farking beak. Except for the eyes, of course, they almost seem like the terrifying mass-production EVA's from End Of Evangelion. Feathered Fiend, indeed.
For anyone who does not like flying, stinging insects, Wallace's Giant Bee◊. The thing has mandibles most beetles would envy. It's endangered, though, so you will probably never see one in person. Some tropers (like me) are almost relieved.
How's this for a creature that's kinda scary, the Ribeiroia ondatrae (and the name is it's good part), it's a kind of worm that crawls into a tadpole, and then when the thing hits puberty, it screws up it's transformation to a full frog, so it grows extra limbs and it's original ones get misshapen quite often as well, imagine going through puberty, and then waking up one day, with your knees bent the wrong way, and your tighs folded the other way, with an extra pair of smaller legs next to your genitalia.
Take a box jellyfish, give it eyes, and you get this◊. There's something very unsettling about that thing.
The Goliath Tiger Fish. Google these monstrosities, and Jaws will take a backseat in your nightmares.
I went on a nature hike where the guide gave a harrowing description of being stung by a caterpillar under the fingernail while on a hike, which soon left him in far too much pain to do the tour he had scheduled that day. After doing reserach, he discovered that this caterpillar was particularly venemous, and he would have died not long after he managed to get back to town for medical attention.
Well, at least caterpillars are too cute for anybody to stay mad at them. Wait, no, I take that back◊.
The way Cuttlefish eat. Slowly approaching........SNAP!
Earwigs. Earwigs. They look like they have pincers on both ends, so you can't tell if they're coming or going, they squeeze into little tiny cracks in your bedroom, and if you have an older sibling, chances are pretty good you believed they're called that because they actually crawl into your ears and lay eggs (they don't, thank God). I would give 98% of the animals and bugs on this page a big hug, but between the fear of artificial ear-semination and having the little beasties repeatedly jump out of corn husks at her while harvesting as a kid, I'm quite ready for that can of Raid.
While I don't know about the "laying eggs" part, I actually did have one crawl into my ear when I was very little. My mother only noticed because I was moaning in pain and unable to sleep. Sweet dreams, everyone.
I almost drank an earwig after it crawled into my drinking straw. This has happened to me twice, and is the reason I don't drink out of straws anymore.
I don't know why elephants haven't been mentioned. Male African elephants are aggressively territorial, but in musth, the elephants mating season, their testosterone skyrockets to about SIXTY times the normal amount, making the worst case of human roid rage look like a baby pitching a fit in comparison. Combine that with the average weight of a male being about 11000 pounds, roughly 5 1/2 tons, almost all of it muscle, and a running speed of about 25-30 miles an hour. Taking into account how many people get killed by these living tanks each year, it's pretty horrifying to think how quickly a circus can turn into a nightmare.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I introduce to you, the Snakehead◊. This terrifying beastie, which is more dangerous than a piranha is considered unique among fish because it has the ability to breathe air and walk on land. I repeat it has the ability to walk on land!
Transformer Owl—A YouTube video showing a certain breed of African owl and its reactions to predators of different sizes. ("Awww. it looks so cute! Ooh, they're placing a medium sized owl in front of it and it's puffing itself up as a defense mechanism. Now it looks even more cute! Awwwwww! Now they're placing a really big owl in front of it and OHMIGOD! WHAT THE HOLY HELL IS IT DOING!?THAT'S NOT RIGHT!!!AUUUUUGHHHHHHH!!!! I WANT MY MOMMY!!!!!!")
The second "transformation" Is it trying to immitate a Lynx, or some other cat. Still distrubing though.
In its natural habitat, it probably would have helped it blend into tree trunks by hiding the eyes and making the profile slimmer. Compare the potoo or tawny frogmouth.
I found the last transformation awesome, not scary.
Most people think of a Hyena's laugh as a funny thing - we even have a trope for it. Now imagine you're alone in the savanna at night, and you hear that laughter coming from all around you. And this is coming from a troper who LIKES hyenas!
Hippos. They look cute, but they have the temper to make a Tsundere look like a Yamato Nadeshiko. They are responsible for the deaths of more people than even crocodiles! And just look at those tusks! I wonder why that little girl in a Christmas song wanted one so badly.
Clearly, someone neglected her education.
Plus, if you merely annoy them, they'll spray you with their feces. Whole different kind of nightmare fuel there.
A hippo's breath smells so foul it can scare other animals off.
Cookiecutter sharks. Don't let the cute name fool you; you will NOT get any tasty baked goods from these fuckers. They are only half a metre long, but feed on other much larger predators like dolphins and seals. How? They lure them in by swimming around pretending to be normal fish, wait for them to come in for a snack and then take as many bites out of the unsuspecting creature as they can before it gets away. And just LOOK AT THOSE TEETH.◊ They were first dicovered after the US Navy started noticing perfectly round holes appearing in the neoprene covers of the sonar domes on their submarines.
You like puppies? Well, Ivan Palov's experiments will make you bite your nails and squirm. In the course of studying animal psychology, most of the the test subject were put into such a condition that just scream Mengele. Case in point
Centipedes and millipedes. DEAR GOD. Why do these creatures exist? Creepy crawly, creepy crawly. . .
Millipedes are cute. Somehow, upping the number of legs even further causes it to Cross The Line Twice. Plus, they don't eat each other and potentially you. The same cannot be said for the giant centipede...
House centipedes. Also known as geji-geji or cave centipedes or hearth centipedes (because they crawl out of your fireplace and up the wall at 50 miles an hour like something out of a horror film). They have a million legs, each over an inch long, enough to look like a 3-inch long hairy moustache, and if you attack one, the legs come off and keep moving. Due to their speed and agility, they're totally not afraid of falling off a wall and running over your face... The good news is, they're very shy and they only eat insects, so they're considered lucky, like other things that come out of your fireplace (crickets, Santa Claus...) They only bite when cornered. And they mostly come at night... mostly. Hearth crickets, which look like some sort of evil cave cricket, are also dam' ugly.
A fucking deep sea shark with a circular saw for a jaw.
God damned giant-ass Stingrays the diameter of a VW Beetle.
Some sort of unholy Dragon/Shark/Zombie/300-toothed-saw.
Proof that there is no loving god, a cross between an alligator and a gar that is decent enough to live in swamps where they can reach you.
A cute 'lil gecko the size of a human child.
A "prehistoric, three-eyed, hell-shrimp".
"The closest thing we have to genuine Lovecraftian elder gods": "condoms full of teeth".
Being from the South, I would like to mention that Alligator Gar are not all that aggressive, nor do they really impact and ecosystem of game-fish as much as the general public would like to believe. It is true, however, that one pulled up on land can easily live for three or more days.
The way the meat, egg, and dairy industries treat animals, as seen in this video.
While the foie gras industry is horrible, CO 2 gas is considered an acceptable, humane way of killing mass quantities of animals. Of course, you're supposed to make sure they're dead before dumping them into garbage cans. Grinding them up while they're alive is also considered acceptable and reasonably humane(because it's instantaneous). As opposed to just dropping them outside to freeze and/or starve to death.
Another article from Cracked concerning the evils of nature. None of these are threat to humans; however, the fact that nature would spawn such sadistic and clever predators is a tad unnerving (and one of those is a plant). The pictures don't help either (the ones with the beetle grubs and the assassin bug actually made me shudder). And the entries start out with the POV of the prey. Oh, and arachnophobes should steer clear of this article. Just saying.
Cracked should have it's own HONF page.
Coconut Crabs and Japanese Spider Crabs. Not fun stumbling on pictures of the former when all you were doing was innocently looking up information on New Caledonia. The latter? Thanks, Alton Brown.
Got through everything else here at Real Life without a squeak. Picture of Coconut Crab; cue five minutes of whimpering and a total inability to click away in case the damn thing started moving.
The good news is- Coconut Crabs is good eatin'.
Wasps, especially yellow jackets and hornets. I recently had a nightmare about there being a nest in the mailbox. And have you read any news stories about "super-sized" nests? This nightmare scenario happens more often in real life than you think.
The grand champion of nightmare fuel-errific stinging insects is the Japanese Giant Hornet. I dare you to search on YouTube. 2 inches long, and its lethal venom dissolves human flesh. And its horrifying helicopter-like buzz.
Not allergic to bees? You don't die in 60 seconds on one sting if you don't recieve medical care? You don't know shit about being afraid of bees.
Two words: Box Jellyfish.
Cone shells snails. Blue-ringed octopi. Recommendation: stay the hell out of the water in Australia.
Even worse (and, in a twisted way, cooler) are the facts that the cone snail hurts about as much as a bee sting, the octopus doesn't hurt at all, and both of them use the poison Tetrodotoxin, for which there. Is. No. Cure.
(Insert Herpes Commercial BGM here) ...but there IS a treatment. Aggressive life support (i.e., intubation and ventilation) started near or before onset of symptoms, stomach pumping if ingested, IV fluids, and certain drugs (alpha adrenergic agonists and anticholinesterases, for those interested) can get a person through the time until the toxin is out of the body; if they survive 24 hours, chances are they'll make it.
And there's no cure or treatment for cone snail poison, either. If you are bitten, you can pretty much kiss your ass goodbye.
If that's so, that would simply apply to the whole area of Indo-Pacific. Here's a saccharine-sweet addition: Synanceia verrucosa, (in)formally known as Stonefish. Armed with one of the most powerful fish toxins and can easily induce even the most stoic bruisers into gasping sobs. A fair trip to the reef flats of Indonesia can yield at least an encounter or two, if your eyes are sharp enough to see them.
In case you don't appreciate how hard it is to see a stonefish, look at this. That's right. These fish are invisible.
As an anecdote, my mother and I were eating at a restaurant in Indonesia that had stonefish on the menu, and over near the kitchen was an aquarium with that label, ostensibly empty of fish. We figured it must be a popular dish. Then Mom came back from the bathroom and told me to go look closer at the aquarium. What I had initially taken for decorative rocks, were actually the stonefish. There were about six or seven of them, sitting in a clear glass aquarium with nothing in it but water. These fish are so good at camouflage that they are hard to spot even an otherwise empty tank of water.
Worse than this is the Irukandji Jellyfish, the demonic little brother of the Box Jellyfish. The Irukandji has the most painful sting of any creature on this planet. Morphine does next to nothing to dull the pain, and unlike the box jellyfish, where you either die in 20 minutes or the pain goes away, Irukandji syndrome can last for up to two weeks. To quote the other wiki, 'even under the "maximum dose of morphine" Teresa remarked that she "wished she could rip her skin off."' I live in a wonderful country.
As terrifying as that is, I had a hard time taking that Discovery Channel program seriously, due to the fact that the whole thing was incredibly narmy
While we're on the subject of deadly creatures found on one of Australia's greatest tourist attractions, the GREAT BARRIER REEF, we seem to have forgotten sea snakes and sting rays. Seventeen species of sea snake are on the GBR, all of which are fatally poisonous, but generally easy-going as long as they stay in the water. And sting-rays are really in the same boat: docile until provoked (ie, stepped on or trapped between a legend and a camera).
You're not much better out of the water in Oz, either. The Australian Outback is a damn scary place. I learned that after reading Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country. 120-degree temperatures, spinifex bushes (they have hypodermic-like tips that break off and become lodged in your skin, inviting flies and infection), all manner of poisonous snakes and scorpions, and did I mention the flies? Bryson's book has a lovely anecdote about how one of the outback explorers brought a camel along which got such a bad bite that they were scooping out maggots with a coffee cup. When a camel starts suffering in a desert, you know you're in a damn nasty place.
The Teddy Bear Cholla, a cactus found in the southwestern US and northern Mexico, is similar to the aforementioned bushes. The needles come off very easily, and are barbed, meaning that with movement, they move through one's body. I remember a guide talking about how a needle got into the sole of his foot, and ended up working its way out of the top of his foot.
Oh, that's far from the worst of it. Cholla is a very odd plant in that it's segmented; it's shaped a bit like a demented balloon animal◊. Those little segments will all break off at the slightest provocation; the plant spreads when they're carried somewhere else and take root. In practical terms, this means you have a decent chance of having an entire 3-inch-long length of cactus attach itself to your leg. The stuff is also sometimes called "jumping cactus," because due to that habit of falling apart and the way human reflexes work, you often won't feel the sting from the thorns until a fraction of a second after you've already moved away, making it seem like the hellish little thing actually jumped across the intervening space to attach itself to your skin. Also, the reason for the name? The thorns are clear and so numerous and fine that from a distance the damn stuff looks fluffy or glowy. So yeah, ridiculous numbers of wickedly barbed, needle-sharp, hair-thin, near-invisible thorns that'll brush off at the slightest provocation, appear to leap gaps, and hurt like the dickens. And god help you if your dog gets into the stuff...
And it stillgets worse - Sydney Funnelwebs are only the second most dangerous variety of the spider. Their fantastically badass cousins, who inhabit Orchid Beach on Fraser Island, are even more venomous and there are a lot more of them per square metre. And the kicker? Go to Orchid Beach today and there stands the decaying remains of a holiday resort. I wonder why they abandoned it...
The lagoons [holding ponds for pig manure, urine, blood, afterbirth, and stillborn piglets] themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, another worker dived in after him, and they died the same death. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker's cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker's older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker's father dived in. They all died in pig shit.
As a permaculture and self-sufficiency enthusiast, all industrial-scale farming qualifies for me.
Puppy mills. Ever wondered where those adorable puppies in pet store windows come from? Well it turns out they're farmed, much like battery hens. That's right, there are battery farms for puppies. The dogs are kept in cages their entire lives and forced to breed continuously, sometimes until their uteruses fall out. Because the dog breeding industry has little regulation, the law does not require these dogs to ever receive vet care, any kind of human contact, or, y'know ever be let out of their cages. Oh, and there are also kitten, bird, rabbit and ferret mills. Good luck ever looking at a pet store the same way again. Moral of the story? Always, always, always adopt from an animal shelter. Seriously. For those who absolutely must have a pure-breed of some kind, at least go to a breeder directly where you can see the mother.
I, a dog-loving troper, find this news to be more of a Tear Jerker than nightmare fuel.
You'll never see a dog for sale in a pet shop in the UK; almost all are bought directly from breeders or owners whose pets have had a litter. The RSPCA and Scottish SPCA take a very dim view of puppy farming.
America is starting to get on this, unfortunately approaching it by punishing legitimate breeders and people who show dogs.
There are also pure-breed rescue places if you want a particular kind of pure-breed cat or dog. Sometimes the official clubs for those animals run the rescue and adoption services also.
This places a whole new and somber, if not sinister, spin on Snoopy's puppyhood at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm.
It gets worse when you're working at a shelter that rescues these puppy mill dogs. I've seen dogs with severe PTSD (There's no other word f,or it), dogs with no teeth, dogs with fur so matted that it's literally coming off their bodies, dogs who are blind, dogs with their ears hacked off...
This video showing the use of "Henderson Castration Tools". Insert the sac into the clamp, put the clamp in a variable speed drill and spin about 20 times until the cord fractures and the balls come right off. Especially nice is the scene where they inject anesthetic into the horse's testicles.
While watching the Planet Earth series, I got to the part about jungles. Now, up until then there have been predator-prey chases, which are understandable, they're necessary. But then we get to the part about the parasitical fungi that can literally cause a Zombie Apocalypse for an ant colony. They even showed the fungus growing from the ant's head. In time-lapse. On Blu-Ray. An then there are the other pics of various other insects. AHHHHH!!!
Oh yeah, didn't they say something like "one species of fungus that specializes in each individual insect to prevent competion"? so for every species of insect on the rainforest, there's a species of this fungus just for that insect?
The Cane Toad is well known in the scientific community for 2 reasons. One is for being one of the worst invasive species on earth. The other? It engages in necrophillia more than any other species on earth. Not just with other cane toads either. Birds, mammals, snakes, lizards, other amphibians, you name it.
Holy shit the cane Toad,i'm deeply afraid of amphibians and this fella is one of the reasons, besides looking ugly and spreading like a plague, it EATS CORPSES,Its HIGHLY POISONOUS and its FUCKING BIG. Its regarded as a pest that should be neutralized.
I got talking to an Australian about Cane Toads once, and he took great delight in telling me all the novel ways people had come up with to kill them. His particular favourite was listening to them pop when you ran them over in a car. My initial reaction was that I was talking to one sick bastard, until he explained they're about the size of a cat. Vegetarianism be damned, they deserve everything.
The honey badger. A member of the Mustelidae family, which includes weasels, stoats, minks, martens, otters, sea otters, badgers, polecats, and the wolverine. We all know how Bad Ass and scary they can be. The honey badger takes it Up to Eleven. It's skin is thick and tough enough that it's nearly impossible to penetrate it even with arrows and spears. It can turn around in its skin with ease. It is a tireless and determined predator, and it will eat anything it can find and overpower. It has extremely few predators, and even the king of beasts himself would prefer to face an angry bull elephant than a pissed-off honey badger. One took the food right out of a puff adder's mouth (the second-most dangerous snake in Africa after the black mamba), then proceeded to kill the snake, receiving a few bites in the process. Halfway through eating the snake, the venom took effect and the badger passed out. A couple of hours later, the badger woke up and immediately began finishing off his interrupted meal with no problem. Oh, and their preferred method of fighting larger predators? They go for the genitals.
Quoth Cracked: "The platypus is God's way of saying, 'I made this thing out of scraps left on the floor and it can still fucking cripple you.'"
My biology class was made of this. Examples: Delivery of pig fetuses for human anatomy class, teacher showing us a cow's eye, and more, but I will only tell the most horrific event that had occured to me.
One day while going into the the locked storage door, a friend told me to look for a "cat." I looked in the back of a room and found a Squick inducing nightmare, a cat opened up, as if ready for surgery, with all organs visible and had a expression of howling pain. I ran out of class that day
I'm surprised no one's mentioned chimpanzees. They may look cute and cuddly when they're babies, but they are absolute assholes when fully grown. There's a reason most primatologists only work with juveniles—adults can grow to be about 5'4" and are extremely dangerous. They're at least twice as strong as humans, and when they attack, they go for the face and genitals.
There have been reports of chimpanzes snatching young childeren and draging them off into the wilderness. Guess what happend next..
Meet the Brazilian wanderingspider◊, certified by Guinness as the most venomous spider on Earth. (Arachnaphobes should not click that second link.) It lives all over South America, and has occasionally traveled all over the world in shipments of bananas◊. They've wound up in all kinds of grocery markets, and even hospitals. The thing can wind up with a five-inch leg span, and in South America tend to inhabit rather well-populated areas. Because they're wanderers, they like to hide during the day rather than build webs—in enclosed, dark spaces. Like under your bed, or in your closet, or the cupboard under the sink.
Bull sharks. While most sharks will only attack when threatened or as a case of mistaken identity, these sharks have been known to attack people without any provocation whatsoever. Don't believe me? Here's proof. But what's worse than a hyper-aggressive shark with no qualms about mauling a human? Try one that goes into freshwater. They aren't just in there accidentally, they have adapted to swim in freshwater and have been found hundreds of miles inland. These sharks have been found in the Mississippi, the Congo, Zambezi, Ganges, Amazon, Euphrates and Tigris rivers among others. The Jersey Shore Shark Attacks, the inspiration for Jaws is now largely believed to have been the work of a single bull shark.
Frogs and Toads. First of all, there are poison dart frogs, which can kill you just by touching you. Venom oozes through the pores on their skin. But that's not the worst of it. See, all the other frogs have voracious appetites. They will pretty much eat anything they can jam into their mouths and (hopefully for their sake) swallow. And the larger the frog, the larger the prey. The largest frogs eat mice. And bullfrogs? They can jump straight out of the water at a bird passing over their pond, catch them in mid-air and swallow them. There is very little reason to doubt that a frog twice the size of a person would swallow that person whole if it ever laid eyes on it.
Speaking of frogs, there is a type of beetle that has been found to suck the life right out of frogs as seen here.
Tiger beetles. They don't harm humans, but just imagine what it would be like if you were it's prey and the last thing you saw was THIS◊. It would also be moving at you at 5 miles an hour, which relative to it's body weight would be like watching as a fully-grown man armed with hedge-clippers comes running at you at 480 miles per hour!
Face eating Northern in the middle of the lake (Northern= toothed, evil fish). My cousin made a joke about it when I was 6. I had a nightmare that bodies with faces chewed down to the bone washed up on the shore. I couldn't bring myself to swim out too deep for years.
A reporter on the BBC World Service tells the story of a couple who visited an Eskimo village in Alaska, and excitedly got to see a live polar bear, and when they got there, were horrified to watch as it was killed in front of their eyes.
On the subject of polar bears. Remember that scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Luke gets ambushed by the Wampa? Literally comes out of nowhere and nearly caves his head in? That's what polar bears do in real life. They cover up their snouts and eyes as prey approaches or as they stalk it, then suddenly spring up and hit it before it even knows what's collapsed it's skull. The best part? Polar bears are one of the few bear species that actively seek out humans as prey.
Birds of prey when they catch animals. That animal will be carried for who-knows-how-long, in terror the whole time knowing what's about to happen, to a nest with baby birds. These babies will then slowly eat it ALIVE. It's much more merciful if the animal is killed before it gets to the nest but that doesn't happen all that much...
It's not an animal, but the full run of carnivorous plants apply. They are truly nefarious traps, which when you read about them sound like something Jigsaw might come up with if he was a botanist. Venus Flytraps are pressure-activated cages. Pitcher plants are impossible-to-escape acid-bottomed pits. Flypaper plants are sticky traps, where the prey dies of exhaustion, starvation or suffocation. Lobster-trap plants allow prey to come in, but keep it from getting out with inward-pointing barbs. The craziest, though, has to be the aquatic bladderworts. They pump out ions to generate a partial vacuum. The plant keeps this vacuum behind a leafy "door". When an aquatic insect comes along and touches a trigger hair, the "door" swings open and the vacuum sucks the insect inside. It's a lever-operated vacuum trap. Thankfully, none of them fall into the Man-Eating Plant category.
The Most Dangerous Animal Of Them All
Humans. Inhabiting much of the planet's land mass, they often kill each other and many other species for fun. And they have nukes.
Considering that there are few animals who kill off members of their own species: humans are truly the most dangerous animal of all, endangering everything on the planet, including other humans. And we're not only talking about genocidal dictators or conquerors like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Djenghis Khan, Attilla the Hun, Pol Pot,... On a huge industrial scale humans are rapidly destroying their own environment by destroying and poisoning nature's life sources, thus putting the survival of all mankind in danger for future generations!
The Mosquito begs to differ. They have killed 45 billion people. To put this in perspective, they have killed more humans then every recorded war ever fought, and more than half the number of people that ever lived.
Plus, there is also the idea that at least mosquitoes have a reason to suck blood, if they don't get the proper nutrients from blood, the eggs inside of them will die.
