Barnorama All Fun In The Barn
Emerald jewel wasp.
It reproduces by stinging a cockroach and paralyzing it with its venom. As the cockroach goes mad from the venom in its brain, the wasp then bites off the end of its antennas. It then leads the half paralysed brain dead cockroach along by its antenna, using it as a lead, towards its burrow.
Continued…
Inside the burrow it lays eggs inside the roach, then buries it alive. While in its tomb the larvae will hatch from within the cockroach and over a period of a week feed off of the (still alive) cockroach. Finally they will eat it’s organs finishing it off, before growing up to go repeat the process themselves.
Terror bird, which lived in South America some time ago, was like 3 meters tall version of an emu and had a giant beak which it used to smash its prey to bits and pieces. Also could run pretty fast.
We lucked out Polar Bears evolved to live mostly away from society, sans a couple remote places. They would easily ruin a Grizzly Bear, a Lion, a tiger, really any other dominant predator’s day.
They are the only active species among Bears known to actively seek out and kill humans. They have huge territories they cover and they can smell you from farrrrr away. Basically Polar Bears are the most evolved, up the food chain predators earth has to offer unless you count humans.
There’s a kind of parasite worm that enters living crickets and mantises and take control of their body. I haven’t got any video links for now tho, but googling something like zombie cricket parasite should do it.
I saw something about a fungus (or something, might have been a parasite) that enters the bodies of ants and alters their behavior. Under the fungus’ influence, they try to go as high up as they can. Usually up a blade of grass.
Then their heads split open and fungal spores burst out.
Not exactly making it easy to sleep at night.
Unconventional, but the amount of people mosquitoes have killed while being regarded in many places as a mild pest is kind of unsettling.
Damn there was an info graphic or guide I saw a while back that showed the annual human deaths caused by different animals, and mosquitoes were at the top by an insane margin (by carrying disease). Like double or triple that of other humans.
There’s an aquatic parasite called cymothoa exigua. It enters fish through their gills and finds its way into their mouth, where it bites onto blood vessels on the fish’s tongue and causes the tongue to die and fall off.
The parasite then latches itself onto the tongue-stub where it lives permanently, feeding off the fish blood, and the fish lives the remainder of its life essentially using the cymothoa as a creepy alien-like replacement for its tongue.
That fish that swims up your dickhole in the amazon.
I scrolled over halfway down this thread, didn’t see any mentions of the short nosed bear.
Imagine a polar bear, but like twice as large/strong/tough, and super pissed we named it because of its nose.
It’s thought the reason it took so long for humans to navigate the bearing strait on their migration to North America is because this huge pissed off cocaine bear kept mauling them to death.
Humans are the most terrifying, followed closely by the short nosed bear.
People joke about Aussie animals all wanting to kill you, but 50,000 years ago it was way, way, WAY worse. There was this “Marsupial Lion” thing, like a big cat/bear/dog that moved silently, had huge grasping claws, a bite that could crush your skull and it could climb. Once it decided to eat you, you were dinner.
And it’s the tamest of the lost Aussie predators. There was a six meter land crocodile, which is exactly what it sounds like (bad for family picnics), and an equally large lizard related to Komodo Dragons and Pirentes that could probably run as fast as a car, could almost certainly climb… basically if it saw you before you saw it, good bye.
Megalodon.
The idea of that is pretty damn frightening.
Flesh-eating bacteria
It is absolutely terrifying. You can be perfectly healthy, get a scratch or cut, next thing you know they’ll have to cut off limbs to prevent the spread, and it’s not sure to be enough
The brain eating amoeba: Naegleria Fowler.
Yeah, it does what you expect it to do.
While there are plenty of prehistoric things that could kill you, I’ve always had a soft spot for the Dunkleosteus.
A 19ft long fish with an armor-piercing bite is scary by any metric, but something about the way the creature’s head fossilized in a way that let’s you know exactly what it looked like when alive is terrifying.
Bird eating spiders.
Goliath bird eater used to be my favourite because I thought it was unstoppable but then I saw one like the Sydney Funnel Web that hides in shoes and can kill small children with a single bite, and the camel spider that is neither a spider nor a scorpion but looks like both.
At present, I find Chilean rose tarantulas the creepiest and the cutest because they’re big hairy bastards but also smaller than your average tarantula.
I have arachnophobia btw.
Arthropleura a 2.5 meter long millipede, that thing would be horrifying to met.