Hummingbird feeders left out for too long in the heat can start growing bacteria harmful to the birds. Too long like over a couple of days.
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Every movie I have ever watched with friends that has a bird calling in the wrong geographic location.
Figs. My mom will not willing eat figs anymore. Look up fig wasps for more unwanted information.
The existence of Bot Flies.
Cicadas. Lot of broken dreams of “Periodical Cicadas” that aren’t the real ones.
The actual number of spiders in a given area (for people I don’t like).
Which particular way have you ruined ducks? I prefer to direct people to the paper on “homosexual necrophilia” in Mallards paper (has photos!!!). That tends to ruin them irreparably for people.
That the spider they saw was not a Brown Recluse. At all.
And finally that the joke “Why did the chicken cross the road: to get to the other side” is about death. That’s not strictly about nature, but it ruins things in general for people (so I thought I’d share).
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My cats are kept indoors for a a whole list of reasons, top three being:
- Cars would run them over
- Coyotes would eat them
- They would get diseases from other cats
I know part of this is driven by the idea that a “wild cat” lives a “natural” life… but people don’t stop to consider that it includes everything on that list, not just the happy parts. Maybe sharing some of these unhappy parts will encourage neighbors to keep their cats inside?
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Absolutely. After my (slightly neglectful) neighbors let their cat roam free (when they live next door to a construction site, no less!), he died from eating rat poison within six months. I loved that cat like he was my own and if I needed any more reasons to advocate against outdoor cats, he was it.
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Oh yeah, also: Dolphins. Had a very awkward dinner table conversation after I trash-talked dolphins and someone asked why I disliked them that much. Honestly, I think some species are charming… but they still kind of freak me out.
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Next time, follow that up by mentioning that their skin has just as many.
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Definitely with the invasive species… I’ve ruined my family’s nice scenic car rides, now they know everything whizzing past on the highway that they once thought beautiful is all knotweed, mugwort, and oriental bittersweet 
but on the upside, I’ve ruined lawns for a lot of people which is a good thing 
That non-honeybees can sting as many times as they please (even if you’d be hard pressed to anger them enough to do it) and that most wasps are parasitoids engaged in layers upon layers of complex multitrophic interactions all around us. Some people seem to find the whole laying-eggs-in-other-insects-and-eating-them-from-the-inside-out thing offputting somehow…
I manage to ruin a lot of things just by pointing out creatures they weren’t aware of before (and they’ve decided they’d rather not have known about). Such as how many ants there are, everywhere, at all times. Or how you can shine a flashlight into the grass at night and all those twinkling lights are spider eyes. Or especially worms in fish - I have definitely ruined eating fish for a number of people once they learn fish themselves are ecosystems for many things!
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A couple big ones:
That that cute little lady bug (referring to Harmonia axyridis) is actually a nasty invasive that enjoys eating the eggs of native lady bugs just as much as eating aphids, poisons everything that eats it, and overall is just getting in there and messing everything up. Not to mention that there are no efforts to control it and that farmers release millions of them onto their crops despite many just as efficient native species.
Honeybees. I am not going to go in deep here because this is a subject I am very emotionally invested in and I might get out of control. Short story, they are invasive and horrible to the environment.
(Both of these apply only to the United States)
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It’s not just great horned owls… one time a barred owl was found with the remains of a long-eared owl in its stomach, and the long-eared owl had a screech owl in its own stomach
Flies living 24 hours is more or less a myth though. Some midges and other small flies that don’t feed as adults have very short lifespans, but houseflies, blowflies and similar brachycerans that are generally what people think of when they hear “flies” live for several weeks.
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I may regret this, but what about ducks?
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I love the wolf spider eye reflections trick- really freaks people out!
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I won’t go into a load of detail here, but let’s just say that male ducks (especially Mallards), are very aggressive and indiscriminate maters. Male or female, alive or dead, the same species or not, willing or not, they don’t care, and have been known to accidentally crush or drown their mates during mating. Yikes. This is just the males though, the females are nothing like this.
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Friend of a friend was very excited to post a picture on Facebook of a hummingbird in his garden. I pointed out it was actually a hummingbird moth, which apparently really bummed him out. I don’t quite understand why - isn’t a moth you can mistake for a bird pretty remarkable?
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I thought it was about their anatomy, didn’t even think about the whole procedure of when males don’t get the partner, their hormone levels are spiking, this reminded me of nature doc when they show female shark with badly bitten fins.
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Combining these two, there’s also First Report of Necrophilia in the Form of Necrocoitus among Insects, Involving Two Male Cryptotympana atrata (Fabricius, 1775) Cicadas.
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I never thought of it that way before 
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Ducks ruined
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Wow! My first thought after reading that was “cursed turducken”. Then I recalled a video I saw where a person caught a fish and then a small shark ate it and was still on the line and then a larger shark came and ate that one.
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If you catch a big pike it will likely have a predator fish inside with more in it.
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