Oh gods. The cricket. Drew had a gooood laugh over that one.

well that is cool. I just can't hack the ants. It wouldn't bother me so much if I hadn't just seen Indy four. I think the whole franchise is getting back at me for thinking snakes are cool and rats are cute.

Yeah, that's all kinds of Hollywood licence there. Siafa ants are African, they don't live in Peru. And unless you're tied down or utterly paralytic, it's not really that hard for people to get out of their way.

Conversely, people who do wind up being killed by driver ants (again, more dangerous than South America's army ants) are most likely going to die by asphyxiation.

Oh! And there are army ants in the US! But they're smaller and more discreet than the South American varieties, so most people aren't aware of them.

Drew had a gooood laugh over that one.

Damn near swerved into oncoming traffic I was laughing so hard.

crickets are fine, spiders are fine, roaches are gross but I can still trap them with a glass and flush them. If I get a teeny tiny ant on me I have to blow it off because I don't want to touch it. Oh and I hate potato bugs because they look like giant mutant ants.

spiders are fine

SO NOT FINE.

Oh. You were speaking for yourself.

I considered having a tarantula as a pet. I have kept rats as pets. D has a pet snake.

crickets are fine, spiders are fine, roaches are gross but I can still trap them with a glass and flush them. If I get a teeny tiny ant on me I have to blow it off because I don't want to touch it. Oh and I hate potato bugs because they look like giant mutant ants.

For me it's wasps. (Which are of course the closest living relatives to ants. Termites are related to roaches, which I find kind of cool.)

Oh! To pull it together, there's a wasp that likes to lay its eggs on a paralysed roach (this is common for wasps, to use a spider or caterpillar or some grub for the purpose.) The problem is, it's a small wasp, too small to drag a paralysed roach back to its nest. So instead, it stings the thing just enough to make it manageable, then bites off its antennae, rendering it effectively blind. Then it hops onto the roach's back, grabs one of the antennae stubs, and steers it back to the wasp's nest.

holy cow that's freaky.

oddly enough a cricket just started chirping somewhere in my house.

SO NOT FINE.

Spiders are superfine.

Actually, I'm not keen on them in person either. (Have you seen our spiders? [link] I get over it, because they're just so cool. But arachnophobia is quite comprehensible to me. (I trust it's obvious that arachnophobes should not be clicking on my link.)

OTOH, I have pretty much zero fear of snakes, who are actually more dangerous.

I considered having a tarantula as a pet.

::shudder::