Hard to Love Species

Oh yeah, me too. Especially the large German house roach. When I lived in the tropics, they would come out of the septic tank at night and run around the house and there was nothing we could do to stop them. EEEK. It’s irrational but I can’t stand the way they get into everything, run around so fast and hide in dark corners. To think that is what you need to be like to survive a nuclear bomb is incredible and I have huge respect for their ability to adapt, but still… I can (and have) lived with spiders, ants, most other kinds of bugs, snakes, frogs and even possums in the house etc but roaches NOPE!

2 Likes

I’ve got “caltrops” (T. terrestris) growing all over my neighbourhood… I’d like to say they are a good deterrent to walking around barefoot, except that they stab through the soles of my sneakers just as well.
And they punctured the front tire of my bike D:

I’ll take ‘ticks, bedbugs, tapeworms, and just about any lifeform that could feed off of or is a parasite of people’ for 300, Alex.

This is the worst game of Jeopardy ever, guys

4 Likes

Endoparasites rank really high for me as species I cannot love.

2 Likes

Hopefully I won’t ever get a photo of one to need IDing.

I just made an observation of one yesterday ;)
Never saw one before.

My thing is armyworms (Mythimna unipuncta). In larval form, they are utterly disgusting. An infestation where I live in the early '80s devastated local flora, and they were just…ugh. Falling out of bushes and trees, covering the ground…in some cases, causing accidents because they made the roads slippery.

I hate European starlings, spotted lanternflies, ticks, mosquitoes, and gnats.

Right now mine is currently centipedes and millipedes (I’ve seen enough of them in my basement thank you)!

I don’t mind taking pictures of bees and wasp as long as I don’t get stung (therefore I tend to stay ‘far’ enough away as possible but close enough to get a shot (if that makes sense).

Also, my folks think I’m weird for taking pictures of spiders and stuff, I like it for some reason (I’ve gotten bite by the small spiders before - nothing venomous so far - crosses fingers).

2 Likes

It really helped me to know which species are considered “aggressive” by human standards and which are relatively harmless unless you do something they consider “aggressive!” This has allowed me to get quite close to polistes and chalybion (which I think are gorgeous and fascinating) and keep my distance from certain hornet species.

Back to the hard to love piece: I have been struggling with my negative feelings towards invasive species as I dislike their presence in the places they aren’t meant to be (yet? who knows what other species they may have piggybacked across the globe more slowly) however, I sometimes have difficulty with remembering not to actually “hate” them as they are just organisms that lack maliciousness. Maybe that’s too deep for this morning. Relativism has no winners but I find I must remember my dislike to communicate the importance of their monitoring and management to others. Any one else good at over-thinking these things?

4 Likes

I genuinely don’t have very many creatures that I actively dislike. Mosquitoes and ticks get dishonorable mentions, of course, but they do have interesting aspects to their life histories. No, for me, the taxon that makes me the most uncomfortable would have to be cladocerans, also known as water fleas. It’s completely irrational, and I wish I could be over it, but something is just off about them in a way I can’t exactly describe. (That’s not helped by a scientific writing class I had to take that featured freshwater zooplankton heavily.) They are genuinely interesting though, and play an important role in ecosystems, so I need to figure out how to get over that.

2 Likes

I have a tendency to overthink everything! And if you think about it, are we overthinking, or are others underthinking?

4 Likes

Roaches are the absolute worst, but also mosquitoes, ticks and most flies.

Bees and ants are perfectly fine though, even though their bite/sting is much stronger than mosquitoes around here!

1 Like

How can you not love them? They live in an environment that is ACTIVELY trying to kill them, yet most of them survive. Yeah, they are gross (think nasal bots in deer etc.), but they have survived the harshest environment we could ever concieve!
PS I’ve never had one, but I still respect them!

1 Like

I’m sure we all had tons of helminths in us.) Not even talking about amoebas.

2 Likes

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.