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I’m a wimp when it comes to bugs. So when an exceptionally large grasshopper made its way onto my blanket recently as I was lounging at the park, I was a little surprised that I didn’t have a panic attack. But this particular grasshopper was beautiful, and his features were so large that it felt like he was actually staring at me, willing me to strike up a conversation with him. Though he eventually hopped away, I couldn’t stop thinking about his gigantic body, so I did some research online to find out if my grasshopper was as big as I thought he was. Turns out, he’s a bit of a pipsqueak compared to some of these giant insects. Though I can appreciate the beauty and grandeur of these insects, I’m thankful that none of them landed on my blanket that day.

Giant Walking Stick
Considered one of the best tropical insects to keep as a pet, the stick insect (Phasmatodea, from the Greek word “phasma,” meaning phantom) disguises itself as varied species of sticks and leaves. The longest in the insect kingdom, it can measure up to almost two feet in length. Many species of female stick insects live alone, reproducing asexually. Stick bugs are vegetarian, but also molt numerous times to eat their own shed skin. When they perceive a threat, they fall to the ground and play dead or dance for hours, swaying back and forth. (Image source: Tajai, cc).

Goliath Beetle
Native to the African rainforest, the Goliath Beetle is one of the largest insects on earth based on its size, weight, and mass. They measure up to five inches in length and can weigh up to four ounces while in their larval stage, before reducing their weight to half as adults. Equipped with an armored shell, adult Goliaths produce a toy helicopter sound once their two pairs of wings emerge and they take flight. Male Goliath beetles have a Y-shaped horn on their heads to battle other males for feeding sites or for females, while females have a wedge-shaped head to assist them in burrowing when they lay eggs. Though they feed on ripe fruit and tree sap in the wild, they enjoy cat and dog food when raised in captivity. (Image source: Naturalworlds.org).

Atlas Moth
Found only in Southeast Asia, the Atlas Moth is the largest of the moth species with the largest wing surface area—close to sixty-five square inches—and a wingspan of up to a foot long. Named after wing patterns that resemble maps, the moth’s wing tips resemble a snake’s head in order to ward off predators. With no mouth, it feeds off fat reserves built up during its caterpillar stage. Females secrete a pheromone through a gland at the end of the abdomen that males can detect several miles downwind. Adults mate quickly since a total lifespan of a female is only one to two weeks. Females lay their eggs, use up their fat reserves to feed themselves, and then quickly die. (Image source: Sean Dockery, cc & Lionoche, cc).

Named after Queen Alexandra of England, the Queen Alexandra Birdwing (Ornithoptera alexandrae) is the largest butterfly in the world. Found in the Oro Province in eastern Papua New Guinea, females are predominately larger than males and have a wingspan of up to fourteen inches. Birdwings feed on the aristolochia plant (Aristolochia schlecteri) to lay their eggs, which contains a poisonous substance that when digested by the caterpillar makes it distasteful to predators. Endangered since 1989, the Birdwing has experienced habitat loss caused by agriculture, logging, and human advancement. (Image source: Lillet.blonde, cc).

Queen Alexandra’s Birdwing

Giant Weta
The Giant Weta, New Zealand’s largest insect, can be four inches long and weigh almost three ounces, while a pregnant Weta can weigh more than a small sparrow. Nocturnal and flightless, the Weta raises its hind legs when frightened, flicking its legs down in hope of “spiking” a predator’s face. Other times Wetas lie on their backs to play dead, exhibiting their vulnerability. One tagged and researched male Weta walked over nine miles in one night in search of a female. (Females tend to stick closer to home, moving at an average of thirty-three meters at night.) Since becoming extinct from New Zealand’s mainland one hundred years ago, the Giant Wetas now live on offshore islands. Its decline stems from predatory mammals and habitat destruction/modification. (Image source: Victoria.beldenson, cc).

Chinese Mantis
Introduced to North America in the late 1800s as a form of pest control, the Chinese believed the mantis may cure conditions ranging from impotence to goiters. They also believed roasting the mantis’s egg cases and feeding them to children could stop bed-wetting. Chinese mantis can grow up to four inches in length and are the largest mantis species on the continent. Though they mainly eat insects, most are cannibals. Females can capture and digest small reptiles and amphibians, as well as hummingbirds. When hunting, they assume a “praying” position and fold their legs under their head, until they unfold to strike and capture their prey. When mating, a smaller male usually jumps on the back of a large female and eventually may become her meal. During copulation, the female may turn and consume the male’s head, keeping his body to complete mating until finished, when she can eat the rest of his body. (Image source: GRBerry, cc & Mark Williamson, cc).

Giant Dragonfly
Recently placed on the endangered species list in Australia from degradation of wetland habitats, the Giant Dragonfly (Petalura gigantean) is considered a terrestrial species throughout most of its life. As true carnivores, dragonflies fly over and grab the insects they consume. Females tend to be larger, reaching a wingspan of almost six inches. Males patrol swamps while females fly in from a surrounding area to mate. If the female does not accept the male, she will curve her abdomen downward; but if accepted, the male grasps and clasps her, commencing their tandem mating flight. Just before copulation, sperm moves from the male’s first genitalia into his secondary genitalia, then the female will lay her eggs one-by-one deep into the swamp’s peat moss. (Image source: Pseudopanax, cc).

Giant Burrowing Cockroach
Native to North Queensland, Australia, the Giant Burrowing cockroach is the world’s heaviest cockroach species. They can weigh over one ounce and grow to over three-inches long. Since they don’t have wings, they are not considered a pest and can live up to ten years in the bush. Some believe the species to be great pets due to their cleanliness, odorlessness, and inability to crawl out of a tank. The name “burrowing” comes from the burrows they dig, three feet deep, making them the only cockroach species to construct underground burrows to live in. Eating dead eucalyptus leaves to prepare for yearly reproduction, females birth one litter of five and thirty young nymphs that stay with their mother for up to nine months before constructing burrows of their own. (Image Source: Intrinsic Enterprises & Peter Halasz, cc).

Giant Water Bug
Thought its body looks similar to a loofah, the bumps on its back are actually eggs carried on the back of the male Giant Water Bug. The largest bug in the cicada family, the Giant Water Bug can grow to five inches and will painfully bite that which dips beneath the water’s surface. Considered one of the worst bites in the insect kingdom—and a delicacy for humans in Thailand—the Giant Water Bug feeds on fish, amphibians, and crustaceans. Their saliva stuns their prey while they suck out the prey’s liquefied remains. When the prey resembles a human, the water bug plays dead, emitting fluid from its anus. Females deposit their eggs onto the males, who raise the eggs by exposing them to air (to avoid the growth of fungus) until the eggs hatch into the nymphs three weeks later, proving that a mother’s work (even when not carrying the child) is still never done. (Image source: NoiseCollusion, cc).

Divine Caroline

There are about 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects on earth at any given moment. Seriously, that’s a real number. For every one of us, there are 1.5 billion bugs.

But some of them are so horrifying, just one is too many. Here are five you want to avoid at all costs.

From: Japan, obviously.

Why you must fear it:
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.

More scary shit:
Here’s how the Japanese hornet treats other insects (and would presumably treat us, if we were small enough). An adult hornet will fly miles to find some squishy shit to feed to its children. Often times, it finds its food in, say, a hive inhabited by thousands of bees.

What to do? Well, Vespa japonica sprays the nest with some of the acid/pheromone and brings in reinforcements, usually consisting of 30 or so fellow hornets. They then descend upon the beehive like an unholy plague of hell-born death engines and proceed to make this world a scary goddamned place. This is maybe 30 wasps against 30,000 bees and the 30,000 bees do not stand a chance.

Behold the hornets systematically seize them with huge, wicked jaws and literally fucking cut them apart, one by one by one by fucking one. In three hours, there are piles of limbs and heads and just fucking bits of things that could possibly have been alive at one point, and the hornets have stormed the hive and flown away with all the bee’s children. Who will then be eaten.

Nature is fucking hardcore.

From:
Rainforests from Nicaragua to Paraguay

Why you must fear it:
It’s a full inch long, it lives in trees and thus can and will fall on you to scare you away from its hive–the one you didn’t know was there, because it’s in a fucking tree. Before it does this, it shrieks at you. This ant, you see, can shriek.

It’s called a Bullet Ant because its ‘unusually severe’ sting feels like getting shot. On the Schmidt Sting Index, Bullet Ants rate as the number one most try-not-to-shit-out-your-spine painful in the entirety of the Kingdom Arthropoda.

Also–and we do feel the need to stress this–they fucking shriek at you before they attack.

More scary shit:
Are you the sort of person who likes to think of yourself as tough? A “badass,” perhaps? “Hard,” as they say?

Some of the indigenous peoples of the area use Bullet Ants as part of this initiation-to-manhood ceremony that they do. You know the kind we mean, with us it’s like, a big party and your relatives give you money and everyone loves you and is so proud of you? Yeah with them, it’s these special leaf sleeves with hundreds of bullet ants woven into them, stingers-inwards. They put them on and are immediately stung to holy fucking bejeezus by, and this is important, hundreds of Bullet Ants woven into the sleeves, stingers-inward.

The goal is to leave them on for 10 minutes, after which their arms are stiff, useless lengths of twisting agony, their bodies wracked with uncontrollable spasms for days. And in order to be actually pass the ordeal and become a man, they have to do it 20 fucking times.

From:
South and Central America, the American Southwest

Why you must fear it:
You know how you can spot one of these? You can’t. There is no physical way to determine the difference between an Africanized bee and a common European bee. None whatsoever.

You can, however, easily tell the difference based on their behavior. Regular bees will give you about nine seconds of being too close to the hive before deciding you’re a threat and then attacking you. So it’s pretty easy to just walk past them without any screams. And if you do get them after you, they’ll consider you to be ‘chased off’ after about 300 feet.

Africanized bees do not roll this way. They give you half a second of being too close before they decide it is time to completely fuck your shit up and empty the entire hive–tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of angry, angry bees. When you run, flailing and crying and soiling yourself while screaming “JESUS CHRIST I’M COVERED IN BEES,” they will chase you for over half a mile.

More scary shit:
Africanized bees owe their existence to science. Warwick E. Kerr created them in Brazil during the 1950s by crossing a European bee with an African bee. He wanted a bee that could live in the jungle. He got a bee that swarms by the hundreds of millions, is insanely territorial, mindlessly aggressive, has killed anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand people. And, can live in the jungle.

And after they escaped and swarmed northward, it turned out they were a-OK with deserts, too. They’ll be in Montana by 2010.

From:
The Amazon Basin. There’s other subfamilies living in Asia and Africa, but these are the most notorious.

Why you must fear it:
By now, you will not be surprised to hear that these ants are, in fact, fucking huge, with the soldiers reaching a half inch in length. You will also not be surprised to learn that they have massive, powerful, machete-like jaws half the length of the soldiers themselves. They’re notorious for dismantling any living thing in their path, regardless of size. They’re also completely blind, which for some reason makes the whole thing worse.

They’re called ‘Army’ ants because their entire colony, comprising up to and over one million insects, is a 100 percent mobile battalion. They don’t make permanent hives like other ants, no, they bivouac down in single locations just long enough for the queen to shit out thousands of eggs, while the soldiers spread out in wide fans daily in search of food (“food” here, means “anything moving”). Then the eggs hatch and they enter the dreaded swarm phase of their existence.

Much like the word “killer,” nature takes words like “dreaded” and “swarm” very, very seriously. They carefully pick up their larvae and go on the move, a near-solid mass of insect death and horror moving steadily and swiftly along the jungle floor, flaying alive and disassembling every living thing too stupid, slow or asleep to get the living fuck out of the way. There is no talk of painful stingers or ballistic acid here, no, this is terror of a far more primordial nature–the kind that simply flows over you by the hundreds of thousands and rips you apart with massive, unbelievably powerful jaws, utterly and literally blind to size and species, considering everything in their path to be a threat to the continuation of their colony.

There are reports of animals the size of horses being overwhelmed and shredded by them. Go stand next to a horse and then think about what that means for you.

More scary shit:
Army Ants are masters of wholly-organic, living architecture. For the good of the colony, the ants will use their own living bodies to build any conceivable structure necessary, latching on to each other foot-to-foot to create protective walls and ceilings against the ravages of the weather, bridges to cross otherwise impassable spans, whatever happens to be needed. (Can they form themselves into a crude catapult mechanism and launch themselves at prey? Not yet.)

There is no other living thing in the entire world that does this.

And, they’re blind.

Now, time for the disclaimer. If you are squeamish or have a weak stomach or value your sanity in any way, you may want to bail out now.

Okay, here goes…

From:
Most species found in Central and South America, some species found all over the world

Why you must fear it:
Oh boy. Ohhhhh boy. Okay, Bot flies.

There are dozens of varieties of Bot Fly, they’re each highly adapted to target a specific animal, they have delightfully descriptive names like Horse Stomach Bot Fly, Sheep Nose Bot Fly and, hey, guess what. One of them is called Human Bot Fly.

They each have a different and elaborate reproductive cycle, all of which end with a fat, half-inch maggot embedded in living flesh. Feeding.

Horse Stomach Bots, for example, lay their eggs in grass. Horses eat the grass. And the eggs. Which hatch in the heat of the horse’s mouth. Upon which they chew through the horse’s tongue and burrow, through the horse, into its belly. Where they meet up and dig honeycombs into the horse’s stomach. And get fat. When they’re ready to be flies, they just let go and get pooped out of the system.

The Human Bot Fly lays its eggs on a horsefly or a mosquito, something that will attempt to land on a human. This carrier finds a human and lands on him or her. The eggs rub off onto the human, whose body heat hatches the eggs. The larvae drop onto the skin and burrow right the fuck in. Where they live. Under your skin. Eating.

Here’s video of them removing one. DO NOT FUCKING WATCH THIS. Fuck, we don’t even know why we linked it.

More scary shit:
Here is the best part. The larvae can grow anywhere in your body, it just depends on where the eggs wind up. Which could end up with you having a fat wormy thing in your tear duct. Or your brain. We know, because that’s happened.

A Human Bot Fly larvae, burrowing into your brain. Eating your thoughts.

Cracked