Any dead insect. I don’t know why, but looking a bug which has been stepped on or smashed against the wall makes me cringe. I guess it’s just my reaction to how many people don’t care about insects and kill them.
I’m fine with living bugs, just not the dead ones.
I hope you can get over your phobia some day as well. I’ve lived with emetophobia for most of my life and they can be pretty crippling. You might want to check out this older thread about arachnopobia and iNat.
Growing up in Hawaii, roaches were just a part of life and we all see them in their homes from time to time (same with geckos and centipedes). Not a fan of those pest ones and they can definitely be a bit intimidating!
The first time I saw a Solifuge I was pretty intimidated. The fact that it could track me and turn to face me was a little creepy. Like everything though a little knowledge helped reduce the fear and I became used to them over time. Now I just wish I had been able to photograph them.
I get that too, but for me it’s not limited to smashed ones. Even just a curled-up caterpillar gives me the creeps if I know it’s dead.
Interesting, I get that feeling too sometimes. Smashed bugs are the worst but seeing a bug that died from predation or from age that is whole also makes me cringe.
The worst of the worst is when you step on a snail and you here the loud crunch!
Totally forgot: one of the only things in nature that turns my stomach is the rat-tailed maggot. Seeing several in a jar of water that my old boss brought to summer camp really affected me. Cool adaptation and all, and the adults are pretty, but…can’t handle those things.
Humans.
I do education with people using snakes, tarantulas, vinegaroons, scorpions. I’ve had people who were so phobic of snakes come to my events year after year working on their fear. Would go from almost passing out when they realized snakes were in the building, to standing just inside the door to years later holding the snake.
Animals fascinate me too much to really cringe at them. The weirder the more intriguing. I’ve spent time in parts of Asia with leeches… I was the only one in the group who ignored them and let them finish their meal. They dropped off and wandered away with their full bellies. My feet were bloody, but whats a few drops. I was very much the odd one out and I’m okay with that.
I just read the infection part, thank you for my new fear.
I’m not sure I have any real aversions, but as my main interest is in ferns I do come into contact with leeches a fair bit, in cool temperate RF (rain forest), and moist gullies in SE NSW Australia.
The ordinary ones are fine (less than 1.5 cm, dark), but we do get some big orange and black ones…
I think I’ve only uploaded one leech, that’s it. But nothing against them, and I’m better than I was.
We also have a big problem with invasive weeds, makes me feel a bit sick sometimes :(
And our snakes will make many people jump, when you almost tread on one, and realize its something like the worlds 3rd most venomous! :) But love watching from a distance, and have a lot of respect for them.
Cockroaches. The give me an almost visceral disgust response.
I can’t say I outright hate any animals, but I find it hard to love naked mole-rats. They’re like uncooked chicken breasts with legs, teeth, and too many wrinkles. The fact that anyone could look at one and refer to it as a “sand puppy”, especially when fennec foxes exist, is astonishing to me. No thank you!
I disagree with this part but I love your description of them. I hear “uncooked chicken breasts with legs, teeth, and too many wrinkles” and just think “aw cuties”.
I had different reactions seeing Desert Giant Centipedes Scolopendra heros, in Arizona out on the trails versus in my cabin. They seemed much more creepy inside than out. So much so I didn’t mind as much the large wolf spider that was sharing the cabin with me. :)
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?
Supposedly Alfred Russell Wallace was against the smallpox vaccine in his time, claiming that it could turn out the smallpox virus had some important role in nature and if we drove smallpox to extinction it could have horrible consequences. So people have even argued in favor of keeping smallpox around (I certainly wouldn’t argue in favor of smallpox, but someone’s is seemingly always willing to argue in favor of something).
@marina_gorbunova
[B]ut 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 went extinct.
Maurico Antón has even suggested that the saber-toothed cats died out due to direct competition with humans. Specifically the two being incompatible ecomorphs: sabertooths being predators who exist at low population densities and were likely to come in conflict with humans over ungulate carcasses and prey. It’s rather suspicious that saber-toothed cats went extinct in the exact order (Africa then Eurasia then North and South America) that humans showed up on these continents. And the ecosystems on those continents are still screwed up because they’ve lost all their large predators that keep the ecosystems in check.
Weak animals make me cringe.
Define weak. The koala has lots of stupid adaptations but at the same time it’s one of the only animals adapted to eat one of the few plant groups (Eucalyptus) that has basically come to dominate Australia. There’s evidence that koalas used to be more diverse, but only the ones specialized in feeding on Eucalyptus survived because Eucalyptus is one of the only plants that thrived in Australia when the continent dried out during the Miocene.
I can honestly say there isn’t a single species that gives me a fear/disgust/cringe response. I mean, I study insects, I think parasites are marvels of evolution and find them endlessly enthralling. When I look at any organism I just see its uniqueness, the ecological connections it has with other species and how it’s shaped by its environment, and that makes every species wonderful to me.
Deformed animals make me cringe. Like two-headed snakes.
I’m sorry, but most of them were extinct long before food revolution.
Ticks for me, too - I’ve had bot flies and been around many other “creepy” critters, but the only thing that consistently gives me a gut wrenching feeling when I find one on me is ticks!
Yes ticks. Got my first bite of this year April 13. Still watching. 
Seems early.
I’m sorry, but most of them were extinct long before food revolution.
The Neolithic revolution is just an exacerbation of a broader pattern of human-induced environmental destruction that has been going on for much, much longer. Basically what happens is that humans tend to target the largest animals in their environment when possible because they offer the highest payoff in terms of calories-to-effort ratio, and then successively “hunt down the food chain” as their previous target species disappear. Something similar has been documented with orcas “fishing down the food web”.
In fact, this is part of the reason why agriculture was invented in the first place. Eventually, as humans continue hunting species in their local environment to extinction, it gets to the point at which it’s easier for people to just try and grow their own food than keep hunting the few small-bodied species that are left. This may be part of the reason why agriculture was seemingly adopted in the Middle East earlier than in other parts of the world: most of these areas tend to be semidesert or chaparral where there are fewer natural resources1 and thus people would reach the point where they would be forced to adopt agriculture to survive faster. Compare this to, e.g., a Eurasian temperate forest or an African savannah, where there are a lot more animals and thus this practice could continue much longer.
Blaire Van Valkenburgh, a specialist researcher on Pleistocene mammals, put it this way. Most predators are in a cyclical balancing act with their prey. The best example of this is the cycle between the Canadian lynx (Lynx canadensis) and the snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus). When the predator population gets too big, prey gets scarce, and predators start to starve. This causing predator numbers to drop, prey numbers increase, and the population is brought back into balance. This works because most large predatory mammals are specialized carnivores.2
But this doesn’t work with humans. For humans, when numbers of game animals decrease, humans just switch to eating something else, usually feeding on roots, berries, or cultivated grains. However, humans never stop hunting game whenever they get the chance. This means that the human population never decreases, the populations of large mammals never recover, and you get this population of apex predators that doesn’t follow the normal rules and just refuses to die when their food disappears.
Add to this human usage of fire to clear out brush and create corridors for hunting game, and none of the environmental destruction we’re seeing now is actually new. It’s just an exacerbation of the same human patterns of behavior that have been going on since the Pleistocene. Indeed, that’s what a lot of archaeologists call it, “intensification”, and patterns of increased “intensification” of human land use have been implicated in, say, the extinction of the thylacine and Tasmanian devil on the Australian mainland 3000 ka. But this is one reason why some researchers are saying the “Anthropocene” concept doesn’t really work, because it’s really just part of a series of human-driven extinctions, habitat-destruction, and climate change that has been going on for over 500,000 years, and it’s not possible to separate more recent human-caused events from things like, say, the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna.
But with regards to cats, there are a number of extinct cats that are thought to have been driven extinct by modern humans during the Paleolithic-to-Neolithic transition about 12,000 ka. Smilodon went extinct in North and South America about 12,000 ka. So did the American lion. Mountain lions were driven extinct in North America during the Pleistocene extinction and had to recolonize from South America. The scimitar cat (Homotherium latidens) went extinct later than 28,000 ka in Europe.
But if it’s big cats going extinct more recently you want, lions were extirpated from Europe in historical times, and this has been directly linked to human persecution and land use by post-Neolithic Revolution humans. Jaguars have been driven extinct across most of their native range, they used to be found all across North America. There’s also a number of extinct tiger populations that used to be recognized as distinct subspecies, though with the revisions to the subspecific taxonomy of Panthera tigris I’m not sure which, if any of them are considered distinct now.
1 - Specifically, populations of large mammals would be expected to be less dense, and most of those would be expected to be clustered around bodies of water like the Nile and Tigris/Euphrates Rivers. Something like this happened in ancient Egypt, where the fact that most of the wildlife was clustered around the Nile meant that over the course of the centuries most of the large mammals in Egypt were driven to extinction.
2 - Bears are similar, but a little different, in that bears rarely hunt large mammals and thus don’t apply constant predation pressure in the way that wolves, hyenas, cats, or humans do.