animal geekery

Bugs. (Don’t click if you don’t like them.)

10 Comments

When you work in a pet store you soon learn which questions you will be asked more often than others. Aside from the standard fare like “Do the GloFish really glow in the dark” (No), “Can I feed rabbit food to my guinea pig” (No), and “Can I put a goldfish in a bowl/why not/my hairdresser’s sister’s best friend did it for years/pleeeeeeeeease” (…), I am also very frequently asked how I can stand to be around crickets every day. People usually ask this when I’m elbow deep in the cricket bin and I have said insects crawling up my arms.

Now most normal people would probably wonder why I’m able to do this, but seeing as I do this several times a day, several hours a week, I’m very used to it by now and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. As such, the aforementioned question still sort of catches me off guard. I scoop crickets, I count crickets, I feed and water crickets, and I catch them with my bare hands all the time. It’s just a cricket, after all. They’re actually kind of cute.

I have a bizarre relationship with bugs. Some of them I don’t mind. Some of them creep me out but they don’t bother me so long as they keep a safe distance from me– spiders fall into this category. I’m not terrified by them but I’d rather they just stay somewhere where I cannot see them.

But there are two insects that I 100% cannot stand no matter what.

Exhibit A: Moths

…

…

…you know what, I went to Google Image search to find a picture to put here and I closed the tab in about two seconds because CREEPY FLAPPY FUZZY AUGH

The really weird thing is that when people find out how terrified I am of moths, they usually proceed to ask if I hate Mothra/the moths in WoW/Venomoth from Pokemon/etc. The answer is… not really. They actually sort of gain this weird sort of bumbling cuteness when you blow them up to a big enough size. But the little guys horrify me beyond belief. I think it’s the whole random twitchy movements and those ugly flappy wings AAAHHH

And yes, butterflies creep me out a little too.

But yeah. Moving on. *composes self*

Exhibit B: Daddy Long Legs

Yeah, screw you Google Image Search. I’m not even gonna try this one.

Long…

Creepy…

Twitchy…

They live in the receiving room at work…

*shudder*

All other insects, I can live with. Spiders I can handle so long as they’re far away. Superworms are gross but not really scary. Giant evil grasshoppers… well so long as they’re in the yard and not in the house and I don’t have to go outside, then okay.

…but I don’t do moths or Daddy Long Legs. Ever.

…OMG I just saw a picture of like 50 Daddy Long Legs all in one place. I HATE YOU GOOGLE OMG WHY DID I WRITE THIS POST *runs away*

10 thoughts on “Bugs. (Don’t click if you don’t like them.)”

  1. Moths freak me out. Also any bug that can injure me and flies. (wasps/yellowjackets/horseflies/small bees.. big honeybees don’t bother me at all, since they’re big enough to avoid easily.)

    Small spiders (esp the hopping ones) bug me, because they’re hard to see. Big spiders don’t wig me at all, so long as they keep their web-building to parts of the outside of the house that don’t affect our normal comings and goings (we have them build beautifully intricate webs over the lattice and windows in front of the house quite frequently).

    You know what freaks me out the most?

    Roaches. Bonus if they fly. Oh. My. God. Shrieking, climbing up a chair, etc… it’s pretty bad. Particularly since they don’t seem to be killed by normal roach spray, but melt under a steady assault of Lysol. (Dear mom, boarding school taught me that lysol melts roaches, the security cameras are probably broken, and not much else.)

    Crickets are fine as long as I’m not using them as fishing bait. 😉

  2. Moths I can take or leave but I do like spiders. Don’t ask why because I have no idea but I’ve always found them fascinating. And yes, I do pick them up and let them wander up and down my arms. I have to admit I do sort of enjoy the reactions that gets from people. But you can keep all the bugs once I encounter a decent sized snake – now them I just love…

  3. moths are evil. no really, of this I am sure. they give me the highest of willies and I will cheerfully screech like a 2 year old who has had their candy taken if one gets into the house and I need it killed. ::grin::

    both my better half and I used to really freak over spiders, but where we live is the place non-harmful spiders go to die, and so we’ve gotten to the point where (most of the time) it goes like this:

    ::BANG::
    Me: what was that?
    Her: Spider.
    Me ::nodding::
    Her: Ex spider, come to think of it…

    The goof that once lived in the apartment on the diametric other side of the building from us (we live in a large rectangle, each floor divided into 4 huge apartments) had an iguana and overbought crickets… which then escaped into the ducts, thus entertaining (not) the apartments closest to him for MONTHS. we only got a few, but they DID entertain the cats, who, unlike every other cat in the universe, do NOT kill bugs, but poke at them and then howl for US to kill them for them, whereupon they then stare at the spot where the bug WAS for hours…

    SO nah, crickets dinna freak me out much either…

  4. I accually like crickets too. there kinda cute 😛 spiders i dont mind, if there far away, moths i dont mind, but tiny spiders, and maggots. those are the two i cant stand.

  6. Uggh, Daddy Long Legs creep me out. I used to have a friend that had a magnolia tree that was full of them. Being a little kid, I thought all magnolia trees attracted the long legged devils and was scared to go near one. As an adult, I like magnolias, but still can’t stand daddy long legs.

  8. Ah! I was confused. In Australia, what we call Daddy Long Legs is a spider. Quite creepy, but a lot less scary than most. Those fly things though… *shudder*… I can see why you’d dislike them! It’s bad enough having a creepy big insect around, let alone when it can randomly attack fly at you.

Comments are closed.