Hmm let’s try to positive, hmm with my first animal mosquito, I love it because despite being from arthopod (less intelligent creature) they have wonderful intelligence, when I sleep I never keep my face open, I seal myself with bedsheet(since here is winter bedsheet is very thick) So its one way or other suffocating, don’t care pollution here is very much,
Ooh so about mosquito, they are intelligent creature with clever mind, My success rate with killing mosquito is literally zero, So I use electric mosquito trap to kill them(or else I have red right hand and walls of green turned into red) but still they fly with so much cleverness, they can act like dead so that they can get sometime to plane escape(meanwhile I am seeing whether it is alive or not), there love as mother is rewardable, every mother risk there lives to rear her young ones, that sucks but it is way of nature.
Cockroaches
Mostly myself.
The visual concept of flatworms is cool. There is an art piece by M. C. Escher that incorporates flatworms that I really love but in real life, they just… are not right. I also feel this way about things like silver fish and house centipedes and just any bug that moves fast in comparison to its size.
A specific story I have with the house centipede is one night I was laying in bed with the light on and suddenly I see a house centipede crawl up the wall beside me. Coming from the crack between my bed and the wall. Left the bed very quickly and released it outside but just the way they move make me gag.
I wish I could appreciate bugs more but the faster and more detailed they are the less I like them visually.
silver fish (known as fish moths in my part of the world) and ticks I kill
other arachnids creep me out
Moths and butterflies, I have a severe phobia of them! Completely irrational, but my body reacts regardless of me telling myself that they are harmless
I still cringe a bit at spiders, but seeing them repeatedly on iNaturalist is reducing that. I even stop and take a photo before killing one in the house. (My wife can’t stand spiders, so leaving them alive here isn’t an option. Out in the world, of course, I leave them alone.)
What still creep me out are maggots (as much for their rotting substrate as for themselves), cockroaches, earwigs, and certain other arthropods. Also quite a few parasites that, fortunately, I don’t have to deal with in real life. I appreciate these things in an abstract way and I wouldn’t argue that they are bad, but I do have a negative emotional reaction to them.
It’s important to note that while some creatures are unsettling, all [wild] animals are designed to adapt towards their environment, not to gain the approval of another species. Some of the most cutest animals have the ugliest behaviours imaginable (ex. stoats) and some ugly animals have the cutest temperament of them all (ex. manatees (though some would argue they’re cute externally too)). Point is, is that we shouldn’t let looks deceive us (kinda hard when we’re a vision driven species), and judge all animals based on whether they’re endangered/harmful or not.
Except arthropods. Those guys are straight out of another planet.
Those two conditions can coexist. Imagine wearing a mask on the back of your head to keep from being ambushed by an endangered species.
If the Guinea worm wasn’t targeted for planned extinction, it would definitely qualify as endangered: from its former range spanning 20 or more countries, it is now found in only 8.
It’s like pubic louse which is loosing its positions, but I can’t really worry for it, if someboy wants to save it, well, they can do so easily.
I make compost with maggots :) and feed some of them to goldfish, so they love them and I love them, I remember one story regarding maggots, we were eating guava in my village one day my grand mother was cutting them, and giving to us than suddenly light was gone, but we kept on eating guava but later when light come we find out there were maggots in guava, and we regreted to eat guava in night :( At that day I learned one lesson always eat food in light :)
There’s a lot of serious questions wrapped up in this topic.
In Round River, Aldo Leopold wrote: “The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”
I don’t mourn the smallpox virus and I wouldn’t be bent out of shape by the demise of Guinea worms (although I seem to recall hearing that animal reservoirs exist for it, making eradication problematic) but the argument that such and such a species is useless/dangerous/cruel/nasty/icky has been at the root of more than one species being wiped off the map. Where does the line get drawn?
Leopold’s Land Ethic speaks to the reality that the natural environment will only be sustainable if humans figure out that we are part of a community of living things that need to be treated ethically both individually and as a community. His earliest work is a century old but even more relevant now than it was then.
Yeah, sometimes conservation can be a double-edged sword.
Sometimes I look back on extinct predators that might have regularly hunted prehistoric humans, and I wonder, did they have to go extinct? Sure, they were once all a danger to humanity, and they had to culled for our sakes, but was it worth the ecological damage? I think it all really boils down to your ethics, of whether you do view human wellbeing as more important than animal, or even environmental, wellbeing.
If the Guinea worm went extinct, I’m certain it would have some sort of negative impact on its ecosystem. But should human beings (and our pet dogs) suffer with dracunculiasis, which can make us non-functional for weeks, and even kill us if we’re (very) unlucky enough? Or even playing with hypotheticals here, if the coronavirus was heavily endangered, would it still be ethical to take vaccines? It’s a tough situation to be in, for both humans and the ecosystem involved.
You don’t need to wonder, leopards are really into eating primates and you can easily say no, there’s no need for their extinction, but it just happens, all extinct big felines I can think of died out because of ecological changes, so there was no actual “damage” as it’s a natural process where many species ent extinct.
I think they’re thinking more like Haast’s Eagle.
The situation with the Guinea Worm seems a lot like that of the California Condor Louse.
Regarding pubic lice, and human lice in general, the research using lice to inform knowledge of human evolution is, i think, facinating. Just couple quick links - https://www.livescience.com/41028-lice-reveal-clues-to-human-evolution.html; https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/lice-and-human-evolution/
But for me, the North American Jerusalem cricket. I don’t know what it is about them, but, ugh.
I saw some black stink bugs on a legume and while hemipterans don’t usually do it for me, they looked so much like a pest I shivered when one fell off on me as it escaped. They had basically decimated the bean pods, if it was they that did that work.
Bean
I am also not partial to mealybugs, spittlebugs, or scales.
Nor codryceps, rabies, or any organism that takes over another one, changing its behaviour or no, to reproduce. Exception being some wasps, as perhaps they’re macroscopic and beautiful when they’re done, but I feel sorry for the caterpillar. Must be a hard life.
Welcome to the Forum! I don’t mind looking at cockroaches, but when one ran over my face in Mexico one night, I became less enamored of them.