Dante Vs. Nature 67

A few days ago I watched this cool ass special about plants that ate insects and sometimes rodents on PBS as suggested by Camille. While watching all these goofy ass insects I got stuck in a Wikipedia hole and wondered which insects hurt the most when they stung us. The second worse is called a tarantula hawk or as I say “churanchula” hawk. Fuck this thing. Ain't a tarantula or a hawk! 

Its about two inches long and gets its name because it paralyzes an actual tarantula and then drags its stupid body to its nest and lays its eggs inside of the spiders abdomen. When the babies are hatched they eat the tarantula for a long time making sure to keep it alive as long as possible. They are then big enough to burst out the spider because nature isn't scary enough so it decided that you should be walking through a jungle one day, spot a dead tarantula, and suddenly these things come exploding out of its body. Tarantula hawks are known as something called nectarivorous and will eat fermented fruit till they get drunk and can't fly. Yeah. That's just what I thought the world was missing. Flying death bugs that are turnt. They say that the best way to handle being stung by one of these is to just lay somewhere and scream. I'm dead serious. They says its because when you are in that much pain you are gonna be acting eleven kinds of stupid and should just chill the fuck out. And scream. The sting won't kill you but you will just wish you were.

The next is the bullet ant and it is known to have the most painful sting. It gets its name because they say it feels like being hit by a bullet. That name had to come late because bullets aren't, like, as old as people who have known these existed for centuries. That can get a bit over an inch long and the pain that they give feels like “waves of burning, throbbing, all-consuming pain that continues unabated for up to 24 hours.” Yeah. Fuck every moment of that. It releases a poneratoxin that this monster creates which is what causes the pain to just keep on keeping on. 

There are some folks in Brazil known as Sateré-Mawé that stuck their hands into a glove full of these assholes as a rite to become a man. Nope! Here what they do. They put the things to sleep first and then sew them into a glove. You can watch all this online by the way. Picture an oven mitt filled with hell babies. The young man puts this on when the ants wake up and has to keep it on for five minutes. This makes the arm shake for days and he himself may do so. Oh, and this ain't some shit you do just the one time. Oh, no. Folks need to find ways to entertain themselves in the wild. You have to do twenty something times over the next few months of years before you are considered a man. Well, call me Nancy because fuck that. I wouldn't do it once let alone twenty something damned times! But...if I did have to do it I would make that shit my community service for the next twenty days. Just get it over with. Be shaking like a leaf in the wind for a damned month. How come, nature?!

Click here for previous Dante Vs. Nature.