OMGJeremy

Nightmare Monster Bugs From Hell

Why, hello boys and girls! Having a good day? Enjoying your time on the vast and mighty Internet? Out for a stroll along through the wastelands of Cyberspace, were we? Looking for a little porn, eh? Searching for something to pass your time and somehow you ended up here, eh? Here in our lovely, fuzzy little warm ball of bitterness, in search of some good old-fashioned Tentacle Rape Hentai reviews? Maybe a few crazy maniac freakjob video game articles? Perhaps you’re here for one of Amanda’s comics, or one of Jeremy’s stories, or maybe you were hoping for a profanity-laced rant about shit I can’t stand? JUST KIDDING! Nobody actually reads those.

Well, guess what, boys and girls? Guess what hellish pitfall you’ve stumbled into? Guess what sort of horrid article this is? It’s about death! Horrible, flesh eating, tormented, tumultuous, screaming death and madness from the bowels of evolutionary hell! Mother Nature is not a kind mistress, boys and girls. Mother Nature is not all bunnies and chinchillas. ‘Nature red in tooth and claw,’ the poets say. The poets are a pack of worthless fags. They only look to the lions and tigers and bears for their blood-shedding, flesh-ripping monsters. They always overlook the bugs. Most people overlook the bugs, because most people see bugs as mere pests, insolent, chitinous wastes of carbon that are only there to give your girlfriend something to shriek about and make you go get a tissue to crush it with. Bugs, boys and girls, today we shall speak of bugs. Bugs that hate you. Bugs that see you as nothing but interfering bags of meat to be wasted. Monstrous, freakish bugs, boys and girls, today we shall discuss the nightmare bugs of Hell.

 

Evolution is a cruel taskmaster. It has created giants and it has created killers, and it leaves those without the ability to adapt to dry up as bones in the dust. Evolution has been far kinder to the tiniest of all its children than it has to us. All we have is logic and reason, which quite often fails us miserably, as the existence of Christina Aguilera and Reality TV have shown us in intricate detail. Evolution has granted the bugs, so small and yet so numerous, some of the most bizarre and terrifying adaptations to help them survive and surpass. The bugs were here when the dinosaurs stomped the land flat, and the bugs shall be here long after we are dead and gone. Prepare yourself to see the coming masters of the Earth, boys and girls. What comes next will not be pretty.

JAPANESE GIANT HORNET (vespa mandarinia japonica)

(Located: Japan, dumbass.)

Go and get a tape measure. Don’t ask why, just do it. Measure out two inches. That is the length of these monstrous hornets of the faraway island paradise of Japan. Now, measure three inches. That is their wingspan. Now, hammer a red-hot spike into your eyeball and pour hydrochloric acid all over the wound. That is what it feels like when one of these nightmarish monsters stings you. The largest and absolutely deadliest, most belligerent and murderous of all the world’s hornets, bees and wasps combined, these gigantic beasts hate every cell of your body and will kill you dead if you come too close.

It would be nice to imagine that they live too far away from human civilization to really do any harm, but no, ooohhhh no, these things live all over Japan, including right outside the vast, overcrowded city of Tokyo. Viciously territorial and equipped for the kill with massive, scimitar-like mandibles and a venomous cocktail of alarmingly toxic proportions that both poisons the blood and dissolves the flesh – fuck the Overfiend, these absolutely gorgeous bastards are the true monsters of Japan.

While you’re squirming in your chairs, let me paint you a lovely little picture – you’re walking along in the woods of Japan, just outside Tokyo. It’s beautiful out, the tall, moss-laden trees are cutting swaths of sunlight to speckle the soft ground under your feet. The sights, the scents, the glorious peacefulness of the place, it’s enough to make you forget that you are only a few miles away from one of the largest cities on Earth. You have relaxed. You are at peace.

As you’re contemplating choosing a nice little spot for some good old-fashioned frantic masturbation, you hear a strange noise, a horrible, rattling clatter from a nearby tree. You look and see a yellow-and-black hornet the size of your thumb slowly rising up from the hollow of a nearby tree like the grim specter of the Reaper. You begin to back away, intent on running and screaming like a terrified schoolgirl, but it darts into your face and sprays you in the eyes with a blast of flesh-melting venom that both blinds you and marks you with a compound of pheromones that calls up all the rest of the workers in the hive. In moments, you are swamped with gigantic, angry insects ramming half-inch stingers into your face, neck and eyes first and any exposed skin second. The pain is akin to having your body torn apart by white-hot pliers, and soon (but not soon enough) your horrible, anguished screams are smothered by the fluids of your stomach pouring into your lungs, drowning you in your own juices.

Much like pretty much every other species of hornet, wasp and bee, the Japanese Giant Hornet’s nest revolves entirely around the lives of the larvae, the upcoming breed of monster bugs. Their appetites are voracious and they must be kept in food at all times, which forces the drones out in search of fleshy vittles for the chewing mandibles of the young for pretty much their entire lives. A favorite meal is the larvae of the European Honey Bees kept by Japanese honey farmers. European Bees, the exact same kind you can find pleasantly bumbling along from flower to flower in your backyard, are alien to Japan and have absolutely no defenses from the hornets. Their larvae are fleshy and sweet, easy pickings for the gigantic hornets, provided they can get past the tens of thousands of bees in the hive. Oh, wait, I think I may have phrased that as if the hornets would have any difficulty whatsoever doing this.

Here’s how it works: the hornet slides through the air like a poisonous arrow and sniffs out a nest of foreign bees. It cases the place, scoping out the defenses and maybe selling heroin to a few children on the side. As it checks out the beehive, it rubs up against it, leaving behind strong pheromone trails that act as homing beacons for the rest of the hornets. In short time, the Giant Hornet’s compatriots will converge on the fortified beehive and embark upon an orgy of death and plunder of truly Viking proportions. Thirty hornets, in the space of three hours, can obliterate thirty thousand bees, grabbing them and ripping them apart with their enormous mandibles and leaving their severed legs, heads and torsos in vast piles to rot in the sun, a gristly reminder of why bringing foreign bees to Japan was a pretty fucking bad idea. For those of you non-math inclined individuals… like me… that amounts to each Hornet decimating one thousand bees every hour, or about seventeen bees per minute. The marauding hornets, with no bees left to stand in their way, will enter the hive, pluck out the larvae, and bring them back to their own nest to be eaten alive.

Naturally, those wild and crazy Japanese have found a way to turn Hornets into Hornetade, and have discovered that the bellies of the Giant Hornets are overloaded with an enzyme that makes Redbull look like dishwater. (Insert obvious joke here). Japanese marathon runner Naoko Takahashi was flying on these enzymes when she ran her record-breaking Olympic marathon victory in Australia back in the year 2000. They call it ‘Vaam,’ and it’s made out of giant, murderous, nightmare hornets. Reports of people who drink Vaam suddenly going ballistic, ripping off the heads of everyone in sight and devouring their spinal columns are, apparently, unfounded.

BULLET ANT (Paraponera clavata)

(Located: Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Peru, all along the Amazon River Basin)

When I decided to begin this article, I realized quickly that if I paid equal attention to all of the monstrous bugs in the world, I’d be here for weeks. I decided, instead, to simply choose the ones that were, to me, the most elegantly terrifying, and to allow for only one of each type of deadly insect. Ants hold a special place of mind-numbing terror in my heart, as I am at the same time terrified of and fascinated by them, and for the purposes of this article, I had literally dozens to choose from. I decided against the merely deadly Fire Ants of America (who synchronize their strikes through extensive use of pheromones, stinging by the thousands all at once), and likewise cast aside the voracious appetites of the Army Ants of Brazil (who march by the millions, vivisecting every living thing in their path) in favor of the malevolent specter called the Bullet Ant, a horrifying monster of an invertebrate that ecologists agree would cause what they refer to as “an environmental catastrophe of biblical proportions” should they ever manage to breach the deserts of Mexico and enter the United States, because absolutely nothing in this country, including humans, has any sort of defense against the monstrous arthropods.

Not commonly known is that all ants have a poisonous stinger, used to subdue or kill their prey. Some ants, such as the aforementioned Fire Ant, have more powerful poison than others. Bullet Ants, however, are the only known species of ant with a sting referred to as ‘unusually severe.’ Wanna know what ‘unusually severe’ means in the insect world? Of course you don’t. Which is why I’m going to tell you anyway.

They are not called ‘Bullet’ Ants because they are the size of bullets – although, at a full inch in length, they ARE the size of some bullets. They are called ‘Bullet’ Ants because the pain their sting causes is akin to being shot with a .45 caliber bullet. The neurotoxin-induced pain lasts for days or weeks, and in enough numbers can kill a full-grown man dead in record time, ensuring that the pain he feels before his body finally gives up and breaks like glass is enough to completely fuck up his afterlife.

Arboreal (which means they live in trees, illiterate scum), Bullet Ants are fiercely territorial and eat just about anything they want. They have highly developed stingers, as well as exceptionally well-formed sound-producing organs. If you come too close to their nest, they give you a warning shriek. They are gigantic, tree-dwelling ants that emit blood-curdling shrieks before swarming on your head and pounding you with the most painful poison in the insect world. Sure, some insects’ venom will kill you quicker, but for sheer, mind-gnawing, gut-wrenching, body-wracking, dear-God-why-have-you-forsaken-me pain, you just cannot beat the Bullet Ant.

Not surprisingly, the tourist commissions of the countries they are found in strongly advise against fucking with the giant shrieking death ants, which is not only awfully nice of them, it’s also pretty goddamned obvious.

AFRICANIZED HONEY BEE (Apis mellifera scutellata)

(Located: South and Central America, the American Southwest)

Africanized Honey Bees, quaintly referred to as ‘Killer Bees’, are a wonderful example of human science, NOT evolution, gone horribly, horribly wrong. Their origins read exactly like a horror movie. Picture it: it’s 1956 and a group of Brazilian scientists are trying to create a hybrid honeybee to increase honey production and quality. They crossed a normal, pleasant, bumbling little European Honey Bee with a normal, slightly more aggressive African Honey Bee, and created a goddamned monster they called an Africanized, or Killer, Bee. Naturally, a large group of them escaped the facility and began to breed like wildfire in South America. It took about a decade before the escaped science monsters managed to establish a series of hives leading northward, but it was inevitable that they would. Insanely aggressive, viciously territorial and just all-around madhouse fucking looney-tunes Biker Bar nasty, they forced out the native bees and just plain took over. In October of 1990, they first appeared in Texas. Since then, they’ve spread to Arizona, and are showing signs of being adaptable enough to eventually survive the rough winters of the American Northwest – meaning that they’ll soon be found as far north as Montana. All together now – YAY SCIENCE.

Killer Bees are, visually, completely identical to normal European Bees. Same size, same coloration, same hive structure – even their sting is exactly the same. They are, to all intents and purposes, plain old European Bees – with one gigantic, glaringly severe difference. They are the angriest insects in the entire world.

Let’s discuss European Bees for a moment. Nice, happy, lovely, fuzzy little common Euro Bees. You’re walking along and you see a Euro Bee’s hive, and because you’re a prick, you decide to mess with the hive, just a little bit. The Euro Bees will allow for around about nine seconds before they attack you. This might not sound like a big deal, but during the course of those nine seconds, the bees are actually gauging you and determining whether or not you pose an actual threat. The stinger of a bee is barbed and rips off when it sinks into flesh, after all, killing the bee in the process. Euro Bees want to make sure that you constitute a genuine threat before rushing at you in hardcore kamikaze bee action, and those nine seconds give you the opportunity to move along and pretty much not be a threat. After they’ve swarmed you, and naturally you’re running like a scared little bitch, they’ll only chase you for between one to three hundred feet, if that, before being satisfied that you have been righteously schooled and going back to the hive to drink heavily and make fun of you.

Now, let’s look at the Africanized Bee. You’re walking along and you see an Africanized Bee’s hive, and because you’re a prick – and because there’s no visible difference between a Euro and an Africanized beehive – you decide to walk over and fuck with it. The bees will swarm and attack you en masse in less than a second, before you’ve even had the chance to begin your fucking-with of it. They will not allow for any time to gauge whether or not you are a threat of any sort or for you to move along, no, they will immediately assume that you are the direst of all threats and treat you as such. And as you’re running and flailing and crying and wetting yourself, you’ll note that unlike their Euro counterparts, they will not stop chasing you after a hundred yards. No, no, these angry, angry, angry little bees will chase you down for over half a fucking mile, swarm all over you, and kill themselves by the thousands to make sure that you hurt as bad as you’ve ever been hurt in your entire miserable life.

That’s the kicker, there. That’s why the death toll of these vicious little bastards is anywhere from a few dozen to over a thousand. It’s not that their venom is any stronger than that of a Euro Bee. It’s that they have absolutely no hesitation about swarming all over you and stinging you until you stop moving or the hive has run out of bees. Death comes in the form of anaphylactic shock – your lungs simply stop moving. They infest Texas and Arizona, and during the two years I lived out in Tucson, the occasional discovery of a new nest made the lead story to the nightly news. They are truly terrifying insects because they absolutely hate the living fuck out of you and everything you stand for, and they want to kill you deader than you can imagine.

THANK GOD FOR THE MIRACLE OF MODERN SCIENCE!

BOT FLY (family oestridae, genus and species varies)

(Located: Most species found in Central and South America, some species found all over the world)

This is the nasty one. The truly, horribly disgusting one that will haunt you for the rest of your life. If you have a single squeamish cell in your body, you’re going to want to skip this entire section and for the everloving fuck of Christ, do NOT look at any of the pictures. I’m being serious and possibly a little uncharacteristically kind here, boys and girls. The family of flies that bears the suffix ‘Bot’ is, while not fatal, among the most horrific insects you could ever imagine. They wield no poison. They have no sting. As adults in their fly form, they’re more-or-less harmless. As a matter of fact, Bot Fly infestations are generally non-fatal. But their unique and highly specialized reproductive cycle is the sort of thing hardcore recurring nightmares of made of. You have been warned.

There are dozens of different types of Bot Flies, each one named after the animal (or animal part) they victimize during the course of their hellish reproductive cycle. There are Rabbit Bot Flies, Cow Bot Flies, Sheep Bot Flies, Rodent Bot Flies, Horse Stomach Bot Flies (I am not fucking kidding) and of course and hooray, Human Bot Flies. You know, in case you felt left out. To understand why they are truly nightmare-worthy, you first have to understand their reproductive cycle, which I have now mentioned three times without explaining. I am not a squeamish man by any means or measure, but even I’m having a rough time with this one.

Here’s how it works, and understand as I write these words that I am in continuing awe of the power and design of Evolution. Each different kind of Bot Fly looks exactly like another flying insect, one that is generally in close-quarters with the Bot Fly’s chosen ‘prey.’ The Horse Stomach Bot Fly, for example, is black and yellow striped like a bee, and the Human Bot Fly looks pretty much exactly like a bluebottle fly. The female, having been fertilized and overloaded with eggs, lies in wait for a flying insect that will be close to their ‘prey,’ and then tackles it in a bizarre Flying Body Press, slams it to the ground and holds it down as it carefully unloads all its eggs on the underside of the pinned insect’s abdomen. Job complete, the female Bot Fly zips off and lets the carrier complete its gristly task.

Here’s where shit starts to get awful. The carrier bug, dazed but unharmed, flies off with a cargo of horror on its underside and goes about its normal business of zipping around and doing whatever the fuck it does, until it lands on the chosen ‘prey’ of the Bot Fly, always a warm-blooded mammal. As the insect struts around on the animal or person’s skin, the warmth of its body reacts with the eggs on the insect’s abdomen and causes them to hatch. The tiny little Bot maggots then drop down from the insect’s abdomen and burrow directly into the soft, yielding flesh, where they make a home for themselves and will live for as long as it takes for them to reach pupation age.

The maggots, embedded in the flesh of their new host, live a singularly unpleasant parasitic life, using their rings of hook-like teeth to carve strips of flesh from the warm, living hole they’ve implanted themselves into, and grow. When they first wriggle into your skin, they are tiny, the size of the eye of a needle. In the space of a few weeks, they will have grown to disgustingly bloated proportions, in some cases well over an inch – depending on the type of Bot maggot. Horse Stomach and Cow Bot maggots can grow nearly two inches in length, whereas Sheep Bot (who burrow inside the nasal passages of the sheep) and Human Bot maggots are generally about an inch in length by the time they’ve grown enough. Oh, just in case this wasn’t freaking you out enough, it’s not just length that they grow, it’s width. They get fat. Really fat. So fat, they bloat out their cozy little homes into grotesque and hideous tumors of maggoty bliss.

When they’ve eaten enough soft, delicious flesh, they wriggle free from their host and fall to burrow down into the soil, where they pupate and emerge, several weeks later, as fully-fledged Bot Flies, ready and willing to begin the horrible cycle of parasitic nausea anew.

Now, you’ll note that earlier, I mentioned ‘generally’ non-fatal. There’s a punchline to that one. Ready? See, it all depends on where the carrier insect lands on you – the maggots will burrow into whatever flesh they first touch. As the pictures I’ve so delightfully supplied show, Human Bot Fly maggots have been found in the soft tissue surrounding the eyeballs. There has also been at least one case in which a maggot that landed on a victim’s head – in this case, a young boy – burrowed directly into his brain, eventually killing him.

Can you imagine? A fat, juicy maggot curling and writhing right behind your eye, ripping thoughts out of your brain and devouring them until you eventually just give up trying not to die? Can you imagine how long it must have taken before it finally killed him? I don’t even want to think about the sort of eye-clawing dementia and screaming, agonized death the maggot caused, but I have no qualms about telling you about it so it can haunt the living fuck out of your dreams for the rest of your life. Next time when I warn you about something, LISTEN.

DEATH STALKER SCORPION (Leiurus quinquestraitus)

(Located: Predominantly found in Israel and Egypt)

I decided immediately that the Sydney Funnel Web would have to wait until the next time I wrote about horrific nightmare bugs of the darkest pits of evolutionary hell (provided anyone reads this one), because sweet fuck, if anything could follow up the glorious trauma of the Bot Fly, it could only be something called a Death Stalker Scorpion.

I have always been infinitely impressed by the absolutely fucked-up twists and turns evolution must have taken in order to produce the scorpions of arachnidae. Look at it. It is, undeniably, the most bizarre and monstrous creature that walks on land. As if the powerful arms and rending claws weren’t enough, Mother Nature saw fit to give the freakish bastards a goddamned stinger dripping with virulent demise. Eight segmented legs and eight beady little eyes adorning a tiny little chitinous tank of elegant monstrosity, God, I love scorpions. All we have here in New York are tiny little spiders that don’t usually induce more than a little startled shriek, but when I lived in Arizona, oh baby, we had big, fat scorpions to offer some serious freakouts. And even out there we had nothing like this, nothing that could ever inspire the sort of terror it takes to be called a Death Stalker Scorpion.

It is, by all accounts, one of the world’s most dangerous arachnids. It may not have the impressive body count of the Sydney Funnel Web, but it has one of the most deadly toxins of all scorpions, and it has that name. Dear God, that amazing name. Someone looked at this beautiful beast and said, “I’m gonna call that thing a Death Stalker Scorpion, now get it the hell away from me.”

Keeping with the unwritten scorpion rule that the smaller it is, the deadlier it is, the Death Stalker is only about four inches long, and look! You can buy them from pet shops! Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t that just like a goddamned human? “Happy Birthday, Faithful Timmy! Here, have a little plastic tank filled with pestilent death! It’s a Death Stalker Scorpion and his name is Fluffy Jim! Go on, Timmy! Play with him! He loves to be stroked! Your mother and I will be in the other room. Have fun!”

I have to admit that prior to about three hours ago, I’d never even heard of a Death Stalker Scorpion, and my hasty research for this section just kept on bringing up the same thing over and over – it’s deadly as fuck and it’s feared by everybody who lives anywhere near it. But then, that’s completely obvious. I mean, really, anything seriously named ‘Death Stalker’ would pretty much HAVE to be deadly and feared, or else it would be called something like ‘Rather Nice Scorpion’ or ‘Delightfully Cuddly Scorpion.’ You’ve never run afoul of anything called a Death Stalker Hamster, have you?

If you have, please send photographic evidence and a location where I could purchase one to xv_bones@yahoo.com (note the underscore between xv and bones). I would name him Fluffy Jim.

Well then, boys and girls, it would appear that I have shot my load of horrible insect death and am now, for the moment, spent. I hope I have given you plenty to think about, what with the giant hornets of hell, the shrieking ants of horror, the angry, angry little bees, the flesh-burrowing maggots and the wondrous Death Stalkers, but for now, the time has come for me to tuck you in and bid you a fond goodnight.

I only hope that the next time you see a cute little utterly harmless fly buzzing around in your house, a noble spider or busy little bee buzzing about on its way from flower to flower, you are given pause before smashing it into paste with your sandal. I only hope that the thoughts of the violent, screaming death that some bugs out there would be only too happy to grant you, the flesh-melting venom and the maggots in the brain, would make you stop and put down the sandal. Because sweet Jesus, you are a hundred different kinds of lucky that all it is, after all, is just a harmless little spider.

And it’s not like it can kill you or anything.

Right?