The All-Time Grossest Insect Bites: BEWARE

by pewpewpew
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February 11, 2009

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The insects I'm going to show you in this guide are some of the grossest organisms crawling on God's green earth. They are not the butterflies that enthralled Nabokov. They are not helpful nor cute like ladybugs. They do not produce tasty honey like bees. They are not what Kafka had in mind when he wrote The Metamorphosis. These insects suck. Literally. They suck your blood. For atheists, these insects are the proof that there is no God. For the religious, look no further for Satan's presence on earth than in the form of these biting insects. From wasps to botflies to brown recluse spiders, here is fodder for all your worst nightmares. And don't let the bedbugs bite.

Fire Ants

The grosses thing about an ant bite isn’t the bite itself, but the sheer number of bites you can get when you’re not careful. Ants travel in packs, and that scary teeming hill of ants is almost like a living, breathing monster in and of itself. What these bites lack in individual potency, they more than make up for in number.

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The Botfly

The botfly is absolutely disgusting. The fly itself hitches a ride on the back of the mosquito to an unsuspecting host. When the mosquito bites the host, the botfly releases an egg right onto the mosquito bite, in the hole where the mosquito bit. In this hole will grow a botfly larva that is one in in length, under the skin of that host, and it will survive on the poor organisms flesh. How messed up!

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Brown Recluse Spider

The brown recluse spider looks innocuous, but the creative is anything but. These spiders don’t bite unless pressed against skin – like when tangled in your clothing – and most of their bites are harmless. But a few brown recluse spider bites are extremely venomous and produce a truly grotesque reaction in the bodies of the members bitten, such as ferocious swelling, blistering, pain, and even in the case of some people, permanent damage to the nervous system. The wound has been described by some as looking like a “hamburger” of swelling, infected skin. These blisters are terrifying to behold.

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Wasps

And I’m not talkin’ about White Anglo Saxon Protestants either. I’m talking about that flying thing, you know, the predatory one that that the stingers filled with venom, the ones that lay their eggs on other animals and let their larvae grow on them, hatch on them, and eat them alive when they are born. Yeah, those awful ones. The ones that kill poor caterpillars and sting people to death. Scourge of the earth.

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Bedbugs

Bedbugs are some of the most horrific pests a person will ever encounter. These bugs can survive a nuclear winter, and they travel in giant packs. They swarm onto your bed in the middle of the night, feasting on your flesh while you sleep, and when you wake up, the only evidence you will see of them are the hundreds of bites you have all over your body. People have had to moves out of apartments because of bedbugs, throwing away all their possessions, spending thousands of dollars to rid themselves of this terrible affliction. Be careful! Bedbugs are not just found in shady Eastern European hostels. Even 5 star hotels have been known to harbor these crazy beasts!

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Ticks

Ticks are awful, not just because they swell up to many times their normal size when feasting on your blood, but because they have the demonic ability to infect their hosts with Lyme Disease, a bacterial infection that can cause permanent damage to your nervous system and organs. And in some people, antibiotics do not work in treating the disease, so these people deal with chronic Lyme Disease their entire lives. They experience Lyme Disease symptoms like extreme fatigue, sleep disturbance, and increased moodiness as a result, despite treatment, and this can have a profound impact on their lives. To say that ticks are a terrible pest is to put it mildly.

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Mosquitos

Mosquitoes are to many people just a common nuisance, but they are the carriers of malaria, an infectious disease caused by protozoan parasites that is responsible for the deaths of between 1 and 3 million people each year, and most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa where they cannot get properly treated. Mosquitoes are seriously evil; the most fatal bug bite of any in the world.

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Flies

Flies are not just the things crawling all over your dog’s poo, nor is it the sort of lovable creature Jeff Goldblum played in the 80s movie of the species’ name. Flies can be biting insects too, and they bring some of the worst pestilences onto the earth like African Sleeping Sickness, a parasitic disorder carried by the tsetse fly that leads to confusion, reduced coordination, and eventual coma and death if left untreated. Flies also carry diseases like dysentery and cholera by crawling around on infected matter and distributing diseases through air. Evil! And, however gross this may be, flies also have the tendency to lay eggs onto things. That means one thing: flesh eating maggots.

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Maggot therapy

To be fair, the video of the maggots on a boy could be maggot therapy, or the “intentional introduction by a health care practitioner of live, disinfected maggots (fly larvae) raised in special facilities into the non-healing skin and soft tissue wound(s) of a human or other animal for the purposes of selectively cleaning out only the necrotic tissue within a wound (debridement), disinfection, and promotion of wound healing.” But still, how messed up is that.

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