Some of our most classic horror film villains are chainsaw
wielding and knife brandishing maniacs. People line up to see famous creepers
like Jason Voorhees, Leather Face, and a host of others using their chosen
implements of destruction and chasing down pesky teenagers. An added horror for
some of these characters like Leather Face or Buffalo Bill from the Silence of
the Lambs is that they take the skins of their victims and wear them. Ever
since the ghastly discoveries at Ed Gein’s house, it seems like we have been
fascinated with this particularly brand of evil. We are not unique in this
behavior though. Today we’ll talk about a couple of corpse wearing weirdos
from the insect world. Let me introduce you to Perisceptis carnivora and Acanthaspis petax.
P. carnivora,
aka the predatory bagworm, is one of the few caterpillars that we know of that
consume flesh rather than leafs like most of their brethren. Bagworms may be
familiar to you as pests of ever green trees where they will infest and build a
cozy little bag to live it. They construct this bag out of the local building
materials, pine needles, juniper leafs, berries, what have you. The predatory
bagworm though has a somewhat more macabre decorating sense. Once these caterpillars
finish with dinner they will take the hollowed out head capsules and other bits
of insect and sew them together with a silk mesh. Once they finish they have a
nice little corpse condo to develop in as they age. They hide in this body bag
and wait for more unsuspecting prey to wander by and they spring out to gobble
it up. They will eat beetles, flies, spiders, you name it. I think this just
shows that folks in horror movies and insects are at the same level of
intelligence, as they are the only groups who would consider walking past bags
composed of corpses in the woods and think they won’t die in the next five minutes.
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| Via: http://www.bogleech.com/bio-larvae.html |
The next organism
is Acanthaspis petax which is a type of assassin bug. Assassin bugs by
and large are our allies as they help kill pests and keep their populations in
check. That doesn’t mean that some of them don’t do so in creepy serial killer
ways. All assassin bugs use their needle like mouthparts to stab and then suck
all the life juices from their prey. A. petax, in particular is an
assassin bug that likes to go and hunt ants. While most assassin bugs discard
the leftover husk when they finish eating, A. petax has a different plan
for that corpse. They actually produce a sticky substance from their back that
they use to glue the dead ants on top of them. Now while Leather Face may use
his skin suits to simply terrify, A. petax seems to depend on using
their gruesome costume as a deterrent for predators. Researchers found that
when these bugs had the ant bodies glued to them, predators like jumping
spiders were ten times less likely to attack them. Pretty ingenious for the
predator to have a couple of different uses for the prey!
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| I was going for a business casual kind of look |
Join us again
tomorrow as scary bug week chugs on! That is, if you dare!
