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Bugs, Insects & Creepy Crawlies

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nohopesnodreams

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
Joined
Nov 18, 2005
Messages
64
EDIT

This a general thread for discussion on insects that do not necessarily fit under Cryptozoology i.e. they're not a new species and or a rediscovered species.


Thanks, TheQuixote

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I found a couple of huge insects on the web in the last week, I realise these ones have already been discovered but makes me shudder to think there might be bigger ones of these out there.

Huge Wasp

This one could give you nightmares, Stupidly Huge Centipede and its eating a mouse so be warned.

The centipede looks prehistoric.
 
Re: Huge Insects

nohopesnodreams said:
I found a couple of huge insects on the web in the last week, I realise these ones have already been discovered but makes me shudder to think there might be bigger ones of these out there.

Huge Wasp

This one could give you nightmares, Stupidly Huge Centipede and its eating a mouse so be warned.

The centipede looks prehistoric.
Click to expand...

:shock: Hornets freak me out, we used to get loads of them in our last house every summer. They're just toooo big, and they're impossible to get out of the house.
I remember hitting one last year at least 6 times after it steadfastly refused to leave our bedroom and forget about using bug spray, they're immune to it!

How the hell did that Centipede grow so large?
 
Maybe a 'Not During Lunch' warning should be posted.
I don't normally get creeped out by things - but that did it. :shock:
 
BlackRiverFalls said:
You didn't say it was a cute mouse :shock:
Click to expand...

A pet mouse, you mean.

According to the all-knowing internet, those things do indeed eat small rodents in the wild, although they are generally given a diet of crickets and roaches when kept in captivity.

(Of course, in the wild they don't have some sick voyeur pushing tame mice in their direction then filming the result for a laugh. They have to catch their own prey.)
 
I think insects and creepy crawlies get less creepy as they get bigger. I'd freak right out if a normal sized spider ran over my hand but a tarantula wouldn't bother me. A normal wasp would scare me a bit but for some reason that huge hornet looks almost cute.

I'd make an exception for that huge centipede though. Eugh!
 
(frivolous post alert)/!\
A giant wasp about to bite somebody on the arse.[/u]
 
As far as I know what keeps the size of insects down is their way of breathing. They got these thing tubes going into their body, relying in oxygen "seeping in" through the tubes. But that only works if the tubes are short or there is not enough seeping, therefore the insects stay small. But as far as I can tell, that only means their cross section should be short. So an insect would not be able to expand much in a cube-shape kind of way, but in a rectangular way there should be no limit. In other words a thin but damned long insect should be okay.
 
HUUUUGE Fly

I know this isn't a crypid but you guys would be the best to help me work out what the $#@^ I saw.

I saw a fly the other day that was massive. And i mean MASSIVE.
Looked just like any old big fly, about 1.5cm long, except it had membranous wings a good 5cm long. They weren't big wings like on a katydid, nor were they skinny wings like on a dragonfly. In fact, they looked just like cicada wings. I know cicadas though and this was no cicada. I've looked through every insect identifier I can find online and I can't find it. Everything with wings like this has a long body like a dragonfly and this did not have a long body.
What the hell did I see?

For identification purposes, you should know that I live in south-eastern NSW, just south of Sydney, which has a temperate climate. This thing was seen about a month back, so it would have been late March, which is mid-Autumn here. Any help?
 
I have a memory/dream I remember from childhood about a huge moth I saw.This creature was about 4" long & 3" wide with wings closed.It was so heavy it could barely fly & then but just a few feet.I picked it up & it's wings seemed to leave a dusty sort of desposit on my fingers.Odd..It's so vivid a memory I can't image it's just a dream,but then such an insect couldn't exist..could it?
 
waitew said:
I have a memory/dream I remember from childhood about a huge moth I saw.This creature was about 4" long & 3" wide with wings closed.It was so heavy it could barely fly & then but just a few feet.I picked it up & it's wings seemed to leave a dusty sort of desposit on my fingers.Odd..It's so vivid a memory I can't image it's just a dream,but then such an insect couldn't exist..could it?
Click to expand...
A "Death's Head" moth or a few other species of large hawk moth could be about that big (although they are fast and strong flyers).

Most moths shed their wing scales when you touch them, which looks and feels like a sort of shimmery dust, and (in some species) can stain skin or clothes because it's so fine it's difficult to get off... almost like blusher or eyeshadow...

Re the upper size limit, weren't there 2-3ft dragonflies in prehistoric times?
 
It could have been a large moth coming to the end of its natural life, and physically weakened on its way to mothy heaven.
 
The square-cube comes into play on regulating the size of any living thing. See Isaac Asimov's essay Just Right, in the March 1969 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, or the essay collection The Solar System and Back.
 
graylien said:
According to the all-knowing internet, those things do indeed eat small rodents in the wild, although they are generally given a diet of crickets and roaches when kept in captivity.
Click to expand...
You didn't say whether the roaches were cute. :shock:

I see very large millipedes where I live during the summer. Not as large as the giant black millipede but still pretty darned big. (Not the little millipedes that you're used to seeing.) Once I even stepped on one accidentally at night. :cry: If you think the common small mills are cute these things are just plain cuddly. Next time I see one I'll measure it.
 
Is it just me, or are insects in general getting larger?

As a kid I can remember wasps and bees seeming huge, but now I'm an adult they're just as big, if not bigger. Even if the average size of crisp packets or chocolate bars appear to shriunk, the size of the was tyat somehow finds its way into my bedroom, or the moth the size of a ping pong ball that wanders in one night, seem to be getting bigger.

Heck we've got a bug zapper at work and after flying at the bars a total of 7 times last month a wasp still wasn't dead. It just couldn't fly anymore, as it had battered its wings...
 
I think that one of the reasons why people may think that wasps in particular are bigger than normal at this time of the year is that at the moment the only wasps that you will encounter are Queens emerging from hibernation. In the autumn and winter all the workers die and the queens hibernate (usually in houses). The queens are quite a bit larger than ordinary wasps. I have had first hand experiance of this when a queen used my room to hibernate in for the winter and i only realized this when i was woken one morning with it walking slowly up my leg. It was a very big wasp and i can assure anyone that it is far from a pleasent experiance to wake up to something that could have starred in a 50's B Movie creature feature crawling up your leg.
 
You should try taking off your boot and finding a two inch scorpion sitting on your foot. :shock:

If there really is higher amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere you might expect bigger plants. But I don't see animal or insect size should change.
 
Xanatico said:
You should try taking off your boot and finding a two inch scorpion sitting on your foot. :shock:

If there really is higher amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere you might expect bigger plants. But I don't see animal or insect size should change.
Click to expand...

Okay. You win! :D
 
Oh, that reminds me of the huge caterpillar that our cat dragged in a couple of years ago. I've never seen anything like it in my life. It was exactly as big as my husbands index finger and a little chubbier. It was still alive and uninjured so I brought it back outside sort of where I thought our [and anyone elses] cat couldn't find it and was just gobsmacked. We neither photographed it, nor did we keep it [I think I told this tale in an earlier post at the time, when my name was just plain old Dingo]. Anyway a month or so later there was this chap in the paper who had found the same kind of caterpillar but he had the sense [and time and could be bothered] to bring it to a museum. They told him it was a very RARE moth and worth a little bit. They also said that his one was the only one in Britain [he lived somewhere oop north]. So rubbish to that. we lived in Bedfordshire at the time and it was definetly the same species.
Anyway, my point is that it was VERY big!
 
I was attacked last summer by one of the most enormous dragonflies I've ever seen. It was a good six inches in every direction. It went for my face and head, then flew under my seat. I was on the phone in the garden at the time, and had to excuse myself while I ran screaming indoors.
 
nataraja said:
Re the upper size limit, weren't there 2–3 ft dragonflies in prehistoric times?
Click to expand...

Yes, species such as Meganeura monyi and Meganeuropsis permiana grew to insane sizes – 16-inch bodies, 29-inch wing spans – much larger than considered theoretically possible for insects today. (Instead of actively breathing, insects rely on air leaking into their bodies via a passive system of pores, and oxygen will only diffuse so far through these tiny tubes.) It has been speculated that the atmosphere they lived in contained more oxygen than ours do today, which would help matters. Also, a few years ago, a type of active breathing mechanism was discovered in some insects – perhaps this could also help explain these monstrosities?

As an anecdote, I once overheard two kids on the underground talking about bumble-bees: one fed the other the standard line that they’re really too heavy to fly as science understands the world, and the other snapped back with heartwarming rationality that they obviously do fly, so ”can’t you see that’s just some guy’s miscalculation?” – by contrast, early giant insects seem to have scientists genuinely stumped.

(Other paleozoic arthropods grew even more impressive: the Scottish Arthropleura (imagine a much wider centipede) and Pterygotus (a kind of underwater scorpion) reached over 6 feet, with some web pages reporting even 10-foot lenghts.)
 
I was agast to see a humongous spider on the side of my house the other day,with a body easily the size of that hornet from hell, the asian one.
And very long , strong legs as I approached it , it saw me coming and leaped at me after raising it's fangs in a threatening manner.
I looked it up in a regional database and found that it was a funnelweb variety called a mouse spider, as it hunts mice and other small mammals,including birds and snakes. It is indigenous to this area.
When it hit the gound(after narrowly missing me!) it ran to a large hole that was surrounded by a webbing that coverd the surrounding soil for about a foot in diameter. It was the largest spider I have ever seen,and even bigger than a tarantula my neighbor once kept as a pet.
The page I found it on said they were extremely dangourous and had a combination of neuro and necrotoxins, and if bitten one should immediately call an ambulance.
Maybe I was wrongto do so,but I killed it as I don't fancy having giant spiders leaping onto me and I was afraid for my 2 small dogs.
It put up quite a fight even against spider spray, and attempted to jump on me as I sprayed into its lair , running at me and jumping at the can and my hand.
I was totally creeped out by it.
 
Yeah, I went on that bug-site thingy (can't remember its name) and I thought it could have been a robber fly but I just keep thinking that I'm sure it had a short body like your average house fly. Oh well. At least now I know what the insect was at the science centre that scared the $h!+ out of me when I was little.
 
That mouse spider sounds really scary. I think I would just have legged it.

I once down in malaysia saw something move around inside a flower. Figured it was some kind of bee. But instead what comes flying out is a large armoured creature, some sort of beetle I suppose. It seemed like it was so heavy it had difficulty flying and mostly looked like that tank bug that comes out of the ground in Starship Troopers. Slightly smaller though.

Also in the same general area, I was staying in a national park. I was sitting in a room in a cabin and kept hearing a banging noise. I figured the wind was making a branch slam against the window. Every now and then it would stop for a while. It was only when I left the cabin to go to the bathroom that I found out the real cause. A cicada, about 6 inches including the wings, kept banging against the lit window in the way you sometimes see moths do. Except due to the size, it actually made an audible bang. And every now and then it would fly down on the ground as if to recover. I started hitting it with a plastic garden chair to get it to move, but it just didn't give a damn. Just had to try and slide in through the door, while it was resting so it wouldn't get in there.

I also saw a centipede about 30-40 centimeters long.
 
citizencane said:
I was agast to see a humongous spider on the side of my house the other day,with a body easily the size of that hornet from hell, the asian one.
And very long , strong legs as I approached it , it saw me coming and leaped at me after raising it's fangs in a threatening manner.
I looked it up in a regional database and found that it was a funnelweb variety called a mouse spider, as it hunts mice and other small mammals,including birds and snakes. It is indigenous to this area.
When it hit the gound(after narrowly missing me!) it ran to a large hole that was surrounded by a webbing that coverd the surrounding soil for about a foot in diameter. It was the largest spider I have ever seen,and even bigger than a tarantula my neighbor once kept as a pet.
The page I found it on said they were extremely dangourous and had a combination of neuro and necrotoxins, and if bitten one should immediately call an ambulance.
Maybe I was wrongto do so,but I killed it as I don't fancy having giant spiders leaping onto me and I was afraid for my 2 small dogs.
It put up quite a fight even against spider spray, and attempted to jump on me as I sprayed into its lair , running at me and jumping at the can and my hand.
I was totally creeped out by it.
Click to expand...


That is fascinating and very very sad as I absolutely adore spiders and that one seemed to have been a feisty one. Maybe its in spider heaven now, where there is the biggest net you can imagine with the biggest flies getting caught every second of the day... ahhhh
 
weird lightning bugs

the recent thread on fairy bugs reminded me of something thats been bothering me for almost a decade now. has anyone ever seen a red lightning bug? i live in rhode island, USA (and i dont and have never suffered from red/green color blindness), and ever since i was little all the lightning bugs ive seen (at least, i assumed they were lightning bugs) glowed red. then, about 8 years ago, i was with a friend, and i flipped out because i saw one glowing green. (it was close, and i jumped back and shouted "what the hell is that?" really loudly.) he quite reasonably thought i was nuts, and calmly explained that all lightning bugs glow green, and there are no red ones. subsequently ive done a little research, and i cant find any picture or mention of red lightning bugs. so now i dont know what to think? was my friend wrong? or was i seeing something other than lightning bugs? i dont know if this is particularly fortean, but i suppose that depends on whether or not there are red lightning bugs. any ideas?
 
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