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Carnival of Shrews
Mar 27, 2013

You're not David Attenborough

Erethizon_dorsatum posted:

You poor bastards with the maggot stories. I would rather wade waist deep through a swimming pool of roaches than deal with those loving things.

I once had to help clear out the bungalow of a nice (but deceased) person who had owned a cat. The person had - sorry to disappoint - not been left to moulder for weeks after their death, but no-one had thought about the cat. Or, indeed, the catflap.

That cat that was an excellent hunter, and had stowed assorted dead mice and birds under furniture all over the place, for what seemed, to a crude non-forensic appraisal, to be about 18 months. Unfortunately, the house was carpeted in luscious acrylic loop pile thoughout, and the maggots from the most recent catches had sort of squiggled their way into the weave and had to be pursued with tweezers.

Although almost blind, those things are surprisingly fast and have great reflexes. It was pretty good fun at first, but eventually I got bored, sprayed the little bastards with meths from a refilled bottle of Windolene, and left the room for 10 minutes.

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Carnival of Shrews
Mar 27, 2013

You're not David Attenborough

Erethizon_dorsatum posted:

Jesus loving Christ

Seriously, I don't know what it is about maggots but I can't stand them. Snakes, spiders, rats, mice, roaches, ants... I can roll with it. Actually I like snakes and rodents. But maggots send me into convulsions of disgust. I try to deal by reminding myself that they are part of nature's clean up crew and help remove decomposing organic matter.

Once unleashed, the pure monkey impulse to hunt and catch parasites with one's fingers is disturbingly gratifying. It seems to be drilled deep into the brain; people under the influence of various stimulant drugs will pursue imaginary parasites until they bleed.

I have little doubt that this has contributed to the success of the primates – after all, most other animals don't have anything as handy as hands. But it's still impressively gross. When a friend loaned me a copy of Feynman's 'The Pleasure of Finding Things Out', my first thought was that it should have a companion volume, 'The Horror of Finding Things Out'. Biology is mostly like that; physics is usually not.

Personally, I do not like leeches very much.

When I was bitten by a good patriotic British leech, I screamed like a child (only when I saw it, the bite doesn't hurt) and implored people to bring lighters, petrol, salt, or swift merciful death, even though I knew you shouldn't use petrol or salt as it makes leeches regurgitate. I was cavalier about leeches because actually most of them are predators, vegetarians, or recognise only cold-blooded creatures as food, so when I swilled about in stagnant water for the hundredth time, I wasn't expecting a bite.

My delighted colleagues told me that that it was a privilege to be parasitised by anything as rare as the medicinal leech, took photographs, and bribed me with the promise of beer until the the hungry annelid dropped off me and we could carry it back alive to the lab and analyse its genetics (to be fair, European leeches amazingly don't carry any known serious diseases). Further scrutiny suggested that the assailant wasn't even the aristocratic doctor's leech Hirudo medicinalis, but a proletarian called Hirudo verbana. We were hoping to contribute to the discovery of amazing new anti-coagulants, but someone had already worked out that the various imposters were operating under the banner of Hirudo medicinalis, so I fed a blood-sucking worm for nothing, a martyr to science.

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