I actually rather like common crackles, I remember boat tails being parking lot bullies when I lived in central Florida, though.
Bradford Pears are awful; besides they way they seem to throw themselves on your car when they break, those pretty white flowers stink.
When it comes to ticks, I hate the nymphs, I’ve had them swarming over my pants so thick that it looked like crawling cinnamon, and they’re small enough to crawl through your socks.
I heard that real daddy long legs are not actual spiders. (Though, I’m not expert.) So you’re still a spider lover.
There are spiders of similar size and proportions that some still call daddy long legs (they have jointed legs while the real ones don’t).
I grew up in North America thinking when people refer to daddy long legs, they mainly refer to the cellar spiders (Pholcidae), since harvestmen (also called daddy long legs/Opiliones) are quite rare or I almost never encountered them in California or Florida where I lived (but much more common whenever I stayed farther north). But it still made sense to call both daddy long legs. It’s just only some with this name are true spiders. Pholcids are “true” spiders while Opiliones (harvestmen) are not.
Then there’s the crane fly sometimes called daddy long legs in Europe and other areas, which is not a spider either.
After a mental inventory of the creepy-crawly and even some cute and fuzzy things I dislike, I realized that for the most part I find it hard to love things that aren’t where they’re supposed to be. Meaning non-native plants and animals as well as those that gain an advantage from human activity. The later meaning everything from rats and cockroaches, to gulls, raccoons, feral pigs, and turf grass. Also, cats are inside pets and should be indoors. While bugs need to stay out of my house. They are outside pets.
In the spirit of the question posted I will include the creepy stuff I don’t like regardless of where they are, even though they’ve already been mentioned: house centipedes, cockroaches, and anything parasitic esp. ticks.
Oh and anything that surprises the scat out of me.
Rat-tailed maggot larvae. They look great in a text book; and for the first two decades of my time as a professional aquatic ecologist, that was how I knew them: Wonderfully adapted larvae with snorkels reaching to the water surface. When I finally saw some in an anoxic pond, I found them repulsive. The snorkels were so loose and stringy and formless that I at first thought they were decomposing. But no…they were very much alive and tangled through everything in my net. This is what causes sampling bias…my every instinct was to wash out my net and find another pond.
I am irrationally scared of big moths. I like to see them outside, but if one enters my house I plain freak out. Same for grasshoppers. In general I love bugs, but not at home. I’m a bit squeamish.
I prefer to stay away from stingy hymenopterans as well :)
Welcome to the iNat forum, @splendiddesolation! For me I have the same thing with camel and cave crickets. They are fine outside, but inside? No thanks! You never know what direction they are going to jump in!
I’ll just go ahead and remove any remaining shred of dignity now in service of making some of you chuckle: Worst, hardest-to-love experience with these crickets? Going to the bathroom in the dark of night (indoors!) and having one of these guys the size of your finger jump on your leg and startle you so badly that you stand up mid-stream and pee all over the floor while you struggle try to turn on a light and locate it. Not my proudest moment…conversely? Probably the cricket’s proudest moment.
Deer flies. Just look at those monsters. Nothing in this world is as gross as they are. They run like Olympic winners, hiding in your hair and trying (and succeeding) to bite you. And they’re so hard to kill. That’s the reason I hardly go into the woods in late July-August, but they do appear even on the field near the forest. If I go there in “proper” time I definitely find one jumping on me from nowhere in my bathroom later. Please, no more.
Daddy long legs are harvestmen[order Opiliones]. They appear to only have one body section, it is actually two, but hard to see the division. They also have only 2 eyes, and no venom or fangs.
There is a spider as you mention that goes by the same common name. It has obvious body segmentation.
Daddy longlegs is a vernacular applied to a number of critters… most notably opiliones, cellar spiders and crane flies. It is a confusion around the long legs, and it would be interesting to find out which one had the vernacular first, and which ones picked it up out of mis-application!
In Russian both opiliones and crane flies are called long-legs, but crane flies are called so officially, while most people call them malarial mosquitoes.
I’m good with almost all organisms. I like ticks, spiders, harvestmen, mosquitoes, crane flies other flies, leeches, earthworms… I especially love parasitoid wasps.
The one fear that I haven’t been able to overcome to the point that I can get close to it is house centipedes (Scutigera coleoptrata). They’ve just got so many legs, and they’re so fast. They make me so uncomfortable.
For me, it’s the feral pig, Sus scrofa. They are an invasive species in the US and cause a high amount of environmental damage. Due to their habit of eating anything that will fit into their mouth, they are causing the decline of native species like ground-nesting birds. I come from a family of farmers, so I’m well-acquainted with the nasty and revolting behaviors of the domestic variety, such as trampling a child to death to get their food. Then there are other things they do that I won’t mention, because they’re um, nsfw.
In my part of Texas, they are so numerous that they will fearlessly run around on the highways and cause deadly car accidents.
Another hated species is the invasive Red Imported Fire Ant. They are everywhere and devour anything that can’t escape from them, like bird eggs, which causes a lot of species decline. They are the reason the Texas Horned Lizard is gone from eastern Texas. They have a habit of building their nests in tall grass, so often I will stand on a nest while taking iNat photos and not realize it until a swarm of them are attacking me.