What animals make you cringe?

100000000000000% agreed with you.

Maggots are creepy to most people but to me they are cute.

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Things like larva make me cringe and most flies.

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I don’t know why I’m the only one who believes maggots are cute.

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Honestly, they can be. Most larva are fairly cute, at least from some views.

After all, this guy was a finalist in the photo competition:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/83471478

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Yes, but that’s not your ordinary grub!

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Hehehehe.

Now, that is an exceptional photo; but you look ordinary larva in the face, up close - they get to look pretty amazingly cute. :bug:

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Colorado potato bugs, but only in larval form. One of my chores as a kid was to squash them in our garden. I really hate to see them, as it makes me feel like a bad person who needed to eat (but so did they).

Okay. I’ll try. After all, I have found slugs are more interesting than I’d thought!

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I have never minded spiders or most insects. I have not feared cockroaches for years, and have even stopped minding leaches, although I still would never let them on me. But I have not been able to shake my fear of true bugs (as in suborder Heteroptera). The way their mouth-parts work makes me fear their bite while caring very little about bites from beetles and bombardier beetle spray. I also have a fear of syringes which I would guess is related.

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That’s me.

And they will likely only get less diverse after the recent Australian forest fires :cry::fire::fire_engine:.
Speaking of koalas and saber-toothed cats, I wonder if drop bears have ever existed, or will one day :frowning_with_open_mouth:.

The scary thing is that even if we count the last one million years as Anthropocene, it is still too short to be considered a geological age.
Geologically speaking, humanity is not a time, but an event.:spiral_calendar::crayon:

I wonder if drop bears have ever existed, or will one day

That is basically what Thylacoleo is. I’ve even heard suggestions it may have hung out in trees to ambush smaller marsupials and even jump on the backs of bigger ones. Some of the bigger diprotodonts have bite marks from Thylacoleo even though Thylacoleo isn’t that big, but that could be just scavenging. But that could be people taking memes too seriously.

The scary thing is that even if we count the last one million years as Anthropocene, it is still too short to be considered a geological age. Geologically speaking, humanity is not a time , but an [event]

Kind of reminds me of how some people think the Devonian extinction was caused by the evolution of trees. That ended up with half of all life on Earth wiped out, and the trees in question went with them.

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I have no fear of poisonous snakes or scorpions and yet I panic if I see a cockroach. I know that this is an effect from past memories in childhood. Sometimes childhood traumas remain alive after decades with no resolution, and they are usually not logical. This is the problem of us having an unconscious mind storing old emotional pain.

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orangutans. I don’t know what it is about them… I just hate them. blobfish and ticks are also a nope for me.

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But blobfish look so only because of changes in pressure, it’s a cute fish.

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I’ve been reading this thread with interest all this time, and every time I come back to read the new posts I try to think which animals make me cringe. I can’t think of any. Not even nematodes with their mouthparts that can be truly terrifying if viewed magnified.
What made me cringe recently, however, at least initially before curiosity kicked back in, was for the first time in my life coming across this thing.
I guess I was taken by surprise because from afar I had mistaken it for a slug and was wondering about the very strange colour – as I got closer, before I could confirm that it was indeed stationary, growing out of the soil and wasn’t going to attack me, the weirdest of thoughts crossed my mind, as if taken from very low-budget horror movies! :rofl:

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Mosquitos, horseflies/deerflies, ticks, chiggers.
Basically, the things that cause me a lot of direct harm, hefty immune reactions, gave me diseases and even permanent damage; but yet you can’t reason with them, give them space, or anything. They just swarm & attack. Unlike basically all the rest of nature, it’s not a case of ā€œgive them respect and/or space and they will do same for youā€, these things just come after & cause harm every time.

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Just today I was taking pictures of the bugs around the yard when I spotted a mosquito drilling into the skin on my arm. For a split second before I smashed it, I considered the possibility of getting a picture of a mosquito bite in action (it was sitting on my left arm, I had the camera in my right hand) but the ā€œnopeā€ response was strong on that one. It still got me though, itchy bump and all that.

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