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Nature is the Stephen King of anthropomorphized abstract concepts: It’s the undisputed master of horror. But unlike Stephen King, nature didn’t run out of good ideas twenty years ago. It’s been going strong for millenia, crafting subtle and intricate masterpieces of terror to unsettle, disturb, or outright kill you. Here’s a few more of it’s finer works:

Cymothoa exigua

Cymothoa Exigua, an ocean-dwelling parasite in the pacific ocean, primarily feeds on the Rose Snapper. And that’s not a picture of it being eaten up there. See, Cymothoa Exigua feeds by attching itself to the base of the tongue and draining the blood until it eventually atrophies and falls off. At which point the parasite replaces the tongue – actually functioning as the appendage – thus ensuring that the fish cannot get rid of it without starving to death.

It’s the only parasite that actually replaces a body part in its host, and apart from making fishing trips rather disturbing when one finds themselves trying to remove a hook from the mouth of the monster from Aliens, it also sets a terrifying bar for all the other parasites out there. I’m not saying that this trend will continue, or that you can expect to find your penis replaced by segmented translucent millipede in the near future, I’m just saying that if that does happen, you should probably run to the doctor immediately, provided that your legs have not been replaced by tapeworms in the interim.

Vampire Moth

This is the Vampire Moth, and it doesn’t need a lot of explaining. It is a moth that sucks your blood. And that is terrible. You worry about bloodsucking from mosquitoes, leeches, and lawyers, and now you have to worry about it from moths too? No longer can you say “don’t worry, honey, it’s just a moth!” and be the brave soldier for your loved ones. No, now you’re the one screaming “vampire!” and then hiding under your bed with a cross everytime you see a butterfly.

They’re a recently discovered species, and the blood-sucking mechanism is considered a “logical evolution” from the fruit piercing mechanism present in many other moths. Take note: Everything that eats fruit is going to “logically evolve” into a vampire. I didn’t fucking say that; that’s science. Take it up with them.

Hatchet Fish

This is the Deep Sea Hatchetfish, so named for the hatchet-like body shape. It grows to about four inches in size, and like most deep sea creatures, it is bioluminescent. Unlike other deep sea dwellers, however, the hatchet fish has the unique ability to deeply unsettle you for the rest of your years by simply turning to face you:

Whereupon it ceases to be a fish and instead becomes a phantom escaped from the Room of Lost Souls, here to haunt the living out of jealousy for their flesh., While objectively I know that the Deep Sea Hatchetfish makes no particular sound, I swear to god that I can hear that thing screaming right now, and I’m pretty sure I only have 7 days to live because of it.

Sydney Funnel Web Spider

The Sydney Funnel Web Spider hails from the land of the Plagued Mother Of Horrors – The Kingdom of the Queen of Monsters, The World of Ancient and Unspeakable Horror – where old and terrifying gods sleep eternally, breathing their noxious miasma of choking fear across this world:

The land of Australia.

It’s one of the deadliest spiders in the world, and unfortunately that old adage “it’s more afraid of you than you are of it,” does not apply to the Syndney Funnel Web Spider: It’s not fucking afraid of you at all. It’s infamous for being one of the most “notoriously aggressive” species, and it will attack immediately when provoked. So no, it’s not “more afraid of you than you are of it,” unless you’ve suffered head trauma that has rendered you functionally incapable of registering fear, or are Daredevil.

The venom of the Syndney Funnel Web Spider can kill you quite painfully within 40 minutes, and since you can find the males wandering incessantly during the summer months, frequently  living in garages, yards, and houses all around Sydney, it probably will. Smashing it is ill-advised, because it’s got little spider rage issues and if you miss, it will probably come after you like Mel Gibson in Payback. But drowning is also not a good idea: The Syndney Funnel Web Spider can survive a full day immersed in water, and are also frequently found in swimming pools.

So hey, vacation in Australia! If you’re too scared of sharks to go in the ocean, take a dip in the pool where you only have to risk the word’s most deadly, snorkeling, furious spider.

Giant Anteater

The Giant Anteater, as anybody with reading comprehension skills can tell you is both giant and an anteater. It’s found mostly in central and southern America, and it’s quite cute in a fucked-up-elongated-face kind of way, like Sarah Jessica Parker. Not so cute? These things:

That’s the claw of a giant anteater laid next to the claw of a Velociraptor. You remember Velociraptors, right? From Jurassic Park? There was that really scary speech about how they use these enormous claws to disembowel you, remember? Yeah, the giant anteater is just like that , except for one thing:

The top claw up there – the bigger one – that’s the anteater.

It uses these god damn gigantic claws to kill jungle cats, which are its only natural predator. It can swipe quite rapidly, using a sweeping scythe-like motion to slash at predators or, if cornered, will grab enemies in a “bear hug,” and squeeze the claws through their body. So is it still adorable now that you know it’s basically an Iron Maiden for jaguars?

Follow Robert on Twitter, on Facebook, or his own site, I Fight Robots. It’s been fun everybody! This is the last of my blogs here at Atom, and I hope you enjoyed them.

The circle of life is a hard thing to understand, but it is vital that all things must die so that others might live. Life, death, and rebirth: The natural world has a kind of spiritual cycle to it that can be seen echoing throughout all of the world’s major religions. And every religion has its devils, so here’s what nature cooked up to fill those roles:

Magnapinna Squid

This is the Magnapinna Squid, also called the Elbow Squid because, well, it’s a squid with elbows, isn’t it? The Magnapinna Squid are so rare that the adult variety of some species still remain scientifically unclassified, as no one has ever seen them alive. Luckily, in November of 2007, a Shell Oil remotely operated vehicle was surveying the ocean floor nearly a mile and a half down, when it happened across an adult Magnapinna and took this video:

Which clearly scared the holy shit out of the men operating the camera. You can really feel their fear here, particularly when the camera starts cutting back forth between empty ocean and the image of the squid like the robot itself had to do a double take. All of the known Magnapinna are non-threatening, but then again, nobody’s really certain. Some of the species, for all modern science knows, could very well mature into precisely what they look like: The terrifying, heartless, super-intelligent monsters from Independence Day, out to colonize our planet for their own dark uses. In which case our only hope is that Will Smith can punch them all in the face as they exit their ships, then humorously converse with their unconscious husks using his Disney-style ‘hood slang.

Blanket Octopus

The Blanket Octopus, or Tremoctopus, lives in the waters of Northern Australia, because that is where crazy scary animals come from. Period. Australia has more terror per capita than Elm Street, so if something looks like a nightmarish monster, odds are it’s probably a household pet in the land down under. But what’s truly disturbing about the Blanket Octopus has little to do with the threat it poses to humans, but everything to do with the unceasing intimidation and terror that it brings to the other marine animals. You see, the Blanket Octopus is the Batman of the Ocean.

Instead of spraying ink, its defensive mechanism is to unfurl a massive, flowing, blood-red cape and fly dramatically about, scaring the shit out of all the surrounding fish like the Dark Knight terrifies criminals. But there’s more! The Blanket Octopus has also evolved immunity to one of the deadlier creatures in its domain, the Portugese Man O’War Jellyfish, but the Blanket Octopus doesn’t exactly take a “live and let live” attitude towards this immunity; it takes full advantage of it, by ripping off the jellyfish’s poisonous tentacles and then using them as weapons against other sea creatures.

That’s right: It rips off the arms off of a deadly predator and then uses them as poison-whips against its enemies!

The blanket Octopus is so fucking intimidating, it even mates like Bruce Willis kills terrorists: The male Blanket Octopus, when encountering a female, fills one of its tentacles with sperm, pulls it from its own body, and then just gives it to the female – who presumably also uses it to whip any motherfuckers that be steppin’. And hey, if that’s not enough to put the Blanket Octopus on the Disturbing list, it also looks like it totally just handed you your ass in a breakdancing contest.

Hairy Frog

The Hairy Frog, native to Central Africa, is so named for the hair-like strands found along its sides and thighs. These aren’t actually hair, though: They’re skin growths containing dozens of arteries that help the frog to stay underwater longer. But even disregarding the fact that they are covered in blood-hair, the Hairy Frog has another unique and disturbing characteristic: It has claws!

Assassin Spider

This is the Assassin Spider. It lives in Southern Africa and – surprise! – Australia.

You know what? All of the horrifying animals native to this country sure go a long way toward explaining their national motto:

“Australia: Even though nature vomited monsters all over this barren isle of Lovecraftian horror, we fucking live here anyway, because we just don’t give a shit.”

But I digress. While the Assassin Spider may look a little sinister in that picture up there – as though it is plotting some sort of nefarious scheme to finally do away with that pesky Superman – that’s not why it made the list. This is:

See, the Assassin Spider is named for the uniquely long neck that separates its head from its thorax which, in conjunction with its proportionally gigantic venom-coated fangs – up to ten times the size of a normal spider – allow it to strike like a snake does: It snaps its elongated neck out and uses those forward-thrust mandibles to spear potential prey.

So hey, fucking check that shit out!

It’s a spider with a spring-loaded giraffe neck, which it uses to hurl its unearthly face (topped with disproportionately large venomous fangs) out at you like a grappling hook made out of my childhood nightmares!

Awesome.

Yes, that is great that something like that exists. I love not sleeping for the rest of my life. I’m so glad I have an excuse to do that now. 

Toe-Biters

That horrible, gut-churning motherfucker up there is called a Giant Water Bug, or a Toe-Biter. Variations of the species can be found all across the world, from South America to East Asia. They’re even considered a delicacy by the Thai people, who must have evolved mentally-retarded mouths to think that eating something as appalling as a Toe-Biter is an acceptable thing to do. The male Toe-Biter carries the female’s eggs to gestation on its back, which results in that nauseating, slime-acne-pockmarked vomit-inducer up there.

The Toe-Biters also have one of the most painful bites of any insect on the planet. They inject large volumes of digestive saliva into their prey as soon as they strike, which immediately begins to liquefy the muscle tissue. And the term “prey,” unfortunately, often does include humans. See, its natural reflex is to play dead when threatened, where it then emits a disgusting fluid from its anus to stop predators from eating it. However, unless you’re a mouth-retard, you’re not likely trying to eat the fucking thing, and therefore won’t even detect its presence. So, it will soon spring back into life feeling threatened, where it will then proceed to rot your muscles with its stomach-juices.

So to sum up: Between making you want to puke up your soul just by looking at it, covering you in anus fluids if you accidentally swim anywhere near it, and causing you epic, mind-blowing pain with every bite, it also makes a Slurpee out of your muscles with its hell-spit because you didn’t try to eat it.

Good god, fuck those squids, Will Smith! We need you on this one, if only to diffuse the horror with your harmless arrogance and cutesy one-liners…

Follow Robert on Twitter, on Facebook, or his own site, I Fight Robots.

Since Octomom exploded on to the collective consciousness like a…well…a vagina that spat out 8 kids, she’s become something of a circus (which is fitting since her uterus was essentially a clown car).  Yet, for all of the controversy surrounding this, there’s one thing that everyone can agree on – that birth was probably foul.  We’re talking the kind of explosion of fluids that other vaginas hear about and spontaneously sew themselves shut.

Octomom might be a spectacle in human terms, but her story has got nothing on the animal kingdom.  Here are just 3 quick stories of mom’s whose reproductive struggles are so incredible that it almost makes me want to reach out to the innumerable women I’ve impregnated throughout the nation.  Almost.

Like this, only with sperm

Supermom #1 – The Octopus

Did you know that when Bryan Adams penned his hit “Everything I Do (I Do It For You)” it was actually a ballad about octopi?  No?  You never wondered why he was called “The Jacques Cousteau Of Canadian Rock”?  Well, he wasn’t kidding. An Octopus mom’s sacrifices for their offspring practically entitles them to martyrdom.  If only more octopi were Catholic…

The female octopus is a one-stop insemination shack.  This is true of both of her reproductive specializations and her reputation among scuba divers for being the Drunken Prom Date of the sea:

Once you go invertebrate, you never go back

Depending on the species, they can carry anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 eggs.  If she is knocked up before her eggs are fully fertile, she can actually keep the sperm alive in her for weeks until the eggs are ready.  In short, never go digging through an octopus’ purse unless you’re prepared for what they might be hoarding.

The female cares for the eggs alone with great dedication, much to the chagrin of more socially conservative fish.  She protects them from predators and even blows currents of water over them to ensure they get adequate oxygen.  She doesn’t even eat for the month-long span she spends tending to them (human mothers complaining about dropping “baby weight” should be taking notes here).  Shortly after the eggs hatch, the mother dies, either from starvation or after reading about projected college costs for her kids.

Supermom #2 – Surinam Toads

The Surinam Toad is better than your mom in both her maternal sacrifices and her willingness to have really freaky sex.  Considering the stuff your mom lets me get away with, that’s really saying something.

The female releases batches of eggs which the male fertilzes and packs on to her back. 60 to 100 eggs will adhere to the spongy skin on her back until the female’s back begins to swell around the eggs.  They literally implant INTO her skin, producing a honeycomb pattern.  They’ll remain wriggling in her skin for 12 to 20 weeks, assuming she doesn’t opt to eat a bullet because heebies are driving her to madness.

At least when I fertilize your mom’s back she can just take a shower…

The larvae develop through the tadpole stage in this state, emerging as fully developed (2 cm long) toads.  Given that the egg-diameter for this species is around 6.4 to 6.6 mm, their volume about triples while under mom’s skin.  Unfortunately, I fear that no amount of math is going to adequately translate what this must feel like, so here’s a video to really get that dry-heaving supercharged:

Supermom #3 – Sea Louse

The word “lice” tends to conjure up some pretty visceral reactions and for good reason.  Unlike other parasites that do you the courtesy of killing you with malaria, lice prefer to target your self-esteem.  They are notorious for striking at early childhood, relegating Little Johnny Head Lice to be the subject of mockery for years to come.  And once lice get hopped up on shame-flavored blood there’s no stopping them.  It’s only a matter of time before they start chasing that high and up the ante by living on our genitals, staging yet another dignity assassination during your adolescence.

Its size is inversely proportional to its hate

Hold on.  Am I the only one who sees this?  Is that little fucker SMILING at us?

I phrased the introduction with a spiteful tone because, unlike the other two creatures above, it is hard to conjure empathy for a louse and its reproductive plight.  Now we can rejoice guilt-free at how much it sucks to be a female sea louse.

The female sea louse is kind of the Bridget Jones of the animal kingdom.  Plagued by low self-esteem and the deafening tick of their biological clock, they can pretty much get talked into anything to land a man.  The male sea louse, a.k.a. the Sea Lothario, tracks the scent of her desperation and drops one of his signature pick-up lines:

Swept up in the euphoria of making her friends endure a bridesmaid dress as gaudy as the last 18 she was forced to wear, she agrees to join him in his burrow.  Upon entering she’s greeted with the 25 or more other sea lice he’s also talked down there, each thinking this is probably just an elaborate premise for a dating reality show.  It could be if the show was “Who Wants To Get Plowed By A Uncaring Sea Louse?”.

Once the babies are ready to be born, the sea louse retires to a quiet corner of the burrow, turns on some soothing new age music, and prepares to have her babies gently chew through her sternum.  They literally make their way out to the world by eating her from the inside out.  I don’t usually put much credence in the notions of Intelligent Design, but you could make a compelling argument that God hates lice as much as we do.

Ian Cheesman is wishing he had more time to ensure no opportunities for ejaculate humor were missed here, but he’s too busy finishing up his stage notes for “Jizz!: The Musical” debuting on scenicanemia.com.

The last installment told you about death-ray firing shrimp, snake-jawed marsupials, and flying snakes. Apparently, that’s just how Mother Nature warms up, and all those other animals were merely the foreword to her encyclopedia of terror. Here are five more animals so disturbing you’ll declare war on the outside world.

Giant Humboldt Squid

 
The Giant Humboldt Squid averages about 6 feet long and 200 pounds, but have been found at heights up to 14 feet long and weighing over seven-hundred pounds. They’re more commonly known as the Red Demon Squid, and that name does not have a backstory that needs explaining: They are usually red, and they are fucking demons. Their tentacles are lined with around 1,200 individual sucker disks, each one in turn lined with around 25 razor-sharp teeth, giving them a grand total of 30,000. They’re incredibly aggressive, hunt in packs, use stealth tactics to capture prey, and display remarkable intelligence. Basically, they’re modern-day underwater Velociraptors.

With 10 legs.

And 1200 fucking mouths.

 
And they hate you – oh god do they hate you.

They’re known as man-eating squid, and that’s not hyperbole. They don’t eat people rarely, like an accident; they do it all the damn time, like a hobby. They live in the Sea of Cortez, and nearly every local fisherman knows somebody who’s fallen overboard to be devoured by these things within moments. Which officially makes Sea of Cortez fisherman the worst job on earth: Sure, you can lose a hand doing construction, or be blinded working with chemicals, but what other profession considers a good day to be one when nobody gets wrapped in a blanket of carnivorous mouths and hauled off into the depths by monsters?

Shocking Pink Dragon Millipede

 
Aw…what are you doing here, little guy? Did you get lost? This is a list for horrible, scary animals – not just weird little dudes. You say you look like a French tickler for elves? You’ve got a point there, I suppose, but I still don’t think you belo- oh, you shoot cyanide? What? Like, the poison? You fire cyanide out from your tiny pink sex toy body? Well, why didn’t you say so earlier? Pull up a chair! Make yourself at home.

 
This is the Shocking Pink Dragon Millipede, only recently found in the Greater Mekong region. It manufactures and fires hydrogen cyanide, which is an extremely poisonous, acidic substance that boils slightly above room temperature and smells of bitter almonds. It’s particularly strange for a creature of its size, because it lives right out in the open – not hiding in shrubs or trees. It just sits out there, garish as hell, daring anything to come near it so it can shoot boiling, poisonous acid at them. You can’t tell me that’s an accident; it knows what it’s doing. That’s like a guy dressing up in drag, heading out to Compton, and then hurling hand grenades at anybody that looks at him sidelong. This thing is not out there defending itself, it’s out there looking for trouble, and may God help your face if you’re what it finds.

Ajolote

 
The Ajolote, also known as the Mole Lizard, is a burrowing lizard that lives mostly in Mexico. It’s disturbing because it only has front legs, which are useful for a tunneling creature, but lacks the back legs which are relatively pointless for something that lives largely underground…and it also resembles something. Something uh, disturbing I guess? Something….look, do I have to spell it out?

 
It’s disturbing because it is a giant crawling penis with tiny clawed hands, okay? That’s why it’s here alongside poison-firing condoms and Cthulu-like monstrosities; because a living severed penis with tiny, near-human arms is so god damn disturbing it would give Freud nightmares, and that guy saw penises everywhere. He was like the penis-seeing version of the kid from the Sixth Sense, and even he would have to admit this thing is pretty fucked up right here.
 

Emerald Cockroach Wasp

The Emerald Cockroach Wasp is mostly native to the Pacific islands and Southeastern Asia, and it’s unique in that it is a brightly colored, solitary wasp with a complex, paralytic venom. It is also unique in that is a master of the undead that utilizes intricate stings, poisons, and amputation to achieve mind control of another species in order to birth its babies within their still-living bodies.

 
When it comes time for the female wasp to lay her eggs, she finds a roach and stings it in a precise spot in the ganglia to reversibly paralyze its front legs, then stings it in a different spot to disable the escape reflex. She then chews off half the roach’s antennae, and uses the stubs to lead the zombified roach around like a dog on a leash until they reach her burrow where she lays her eggs in its stomach, and buries it alive. The lobotomized roach then rests quietly while the baby inside of it hatches, and proceeds to systematically eat the roach’s internal organs in a specific order that keeps it alive until the very end, at which point the new wasp finishes hollowing out the shell and emerges.

Basically, it’s part Ridley Scott’s Alien, part Heinlein’s Puppet Master, and part Dungeons and Dragons’ Necromancer. She surgically alters her prey with poison and forms it into a zombie all to let her babies hollow out its still-living internal organs. Man…just like a woman, am I right, fellas?!

Side Note: If you actually agreed with that statement, then you know horrifying, unearthly women and should phone the authorities immediately.
 

Deep Sea Frilled Shark

 
This creature was, until recently, thought to be extinct. Probably because that’s what the marine biologists really hoped was true when they found the fossils of a 7-foot long half snake, half shark. Upon discovery, I would assume something like that was long since dead too, if only so I could sleep at night without the aid of eight fingers of bourbon and a panic room.

The scientists were wrong though, as they saw when the sharks started occasionally popping up in the nets of deep-sea trawlers. These bizarre creatures were always brought up dead, which is a fortunate fact that could have gone a long way toward proving the existence of a kind and merciful God…except that one was recently filmed alive off the waters of Japan. They supposedly live all around the world, but it was only first encountered in Japanese waters because, as Godzilla taught us, that’s where all good monsters come from.  If you never thought you’d live to see a shark fucking slither at you, you might want to watch this video:

If you did think you’d see this day, then congratulations! You are H.P. Lovecraft, and if you’re reading this blog, then you’ve beaten death! Good for you! For the rest of you, here’s an adorable moonwalking bird, so you can go back to pretending that nature doesn’t actively hate you:

And may God have mercy on your souls.

You can read more from Robert at his own site, I Fight Robots