Nick - Nature Is Scary

This is a video of a cricket committing suicide because a parasitic worm in its body told it to. This video is disgusting. This video is not for the faint of heart.

For all of nature's beauty and stuff, it is a scary place. Imagine that you're a cricket; you don't know why this worm larger than yourself is living inside of your body. You don't know how it got there. You just know that something hurts and that you don't feel right.

Even scarier is that this worm somehow forces the cricket to jump into water and drown itself. That is scary shit. It takes advantage of the cricket's natural instincts and inhibitions, and perverts them to its own devices. It's like having an itch that you need to scratch, until you die.

And it gets scarier than that. Next is a video of a caterpillar.

Spoiler: He gets eaten from the inside out, and his brain gets taken over to make him protect the parasites.

We, as humans, enjoy a fantastic luxury: We have arms and thoughts. If, as a human, you had a parasite, you would probably go to the doctor because you felt that something is wrong. Doctor would take some tests, tell you you have a parasite, and give you some kind of chemical that kills the parasite.

However, as a caterpillar, you don't have that kind of luxury. And it goes deeper than just not being able to intelligently solve your parasite problem; you also don't have arms. Meaning that you can't reach all of your body. So if a wasp swoops down and lays eggs in you, there's not really much that you can do about it.

So you, as a caterpillar, would have to do your best to go about your life. Except that you're on a timer, because you can feel the little wasp larvae eating your insides. And then, slowly, your behavior would begin to change until you are no longer feeding yourself, or doing anything other than parasite-modified behavior.

And to add insult to fatality, you also have to protect the little assholes after they eat their way out of your skin. You don't even get the pleasure of fighting them to your death, or maybe taking out one or two of them as you die of flesh wounds.

Wasps are brutal and terrifying. I'm so glad that I'm not a caterpillar. I do not want to be wasp-raped.

I am not going to sleep very well tonight.

-Nick.