Monsters of the world – The Phorid Fly

The most nightmarish of nature’s demons are not just gigantic – perhaps one of the most devastating monsters are the much loathed fire ants spreading across civilization.

Imagine a demon so terrifying that fire ants deliberately go out of their way to avoid it at all costs.

The phorid fly is the stuff of HR Giger’s nightmares. This lady swoops down on a hapless fire ant and rapes her with piercing needle – the needle injects the fly’s fertilized egg.

 

 

But that’s only the beginning of this horror story.

As the baby maggot grows, it makes its way towards the ant’s head. There, it begins to feast on the ant’s brain. While eating the ant’s brain, the maggot engages in a little understood ‘mind control’, taking control of the ant’s central nervous system and leading it off to a nice quiet place where her fellow workers can’t hear her screams. After the maggot has eaten all of the ant’s brain and is ready to make a cocoon, it decapitates the ant’s head and forms a pupa inside of it. The ant’s severed head then serves as an incubator until the phorid fly is ready to take off and spread terror again.

Strikingly similar to the fire ants themselves, the phorid is native to Argentina. While the fire ant has had free reign to devour the United States since landing there in the 1930s, the phorid fly keeps the fire ants hiding away in terror in their motherland. Today, phorids are being introduced throughout the United States with the hope that there will be similar results there.

Perhaps it’s not just the ants that are under the fly’s control.

Monsters of the world – The Styxosaur

Contrary to what your mom told you, monsters *do* exist, and as a public service I am going to prove it to you.  You will never sleep again thanks to a new weekly feature on the most terrifying hellspawn evolution has ever come up with.

So, picture this; you’re out for a nice swim on a calm summer day. You’re about a nice thirty or forty feet out, far out enough that you can’t see the bottom anymore in the murky, deep blue see.

Which is when it gets you.

From the black night of the abyss, a massive open mouth comes surging towards you. Before you can even scream, you are impaled from both sides on massive tusks and sucked down the worse waterslide you’ll ever see, then landing into a bath of battery acid and razor sharp rocks which pulverize and dissolve you as you figure out a way to die.

You’ve just become the dinner of a particularly large species of dragon, the Styxosaurus, a forty-foot long monster that more commonly preys on whale-eating giant squid, dolphin-like ichthyosaurs and noteworthy republican Chuck Norris.

They are among the few and proud apex preditors not to be killed by humans or orcas, for obvious reasons. With razor sharp teeth and eyes that can pierce right through your soul, the Styxosaurus is among nature’s ultimate ocean hunters.

Because of the elusive nature of gigantic monsters that eat your nightmares for lunch, relatively little is known about these massive undersea carnagevores. To date, not a single specimen has ever been brought down by man-made weaponry, and while reports of napalmesque fire breath are contestable due to a complete lack of survivors we can safely guess that looking into those cold eyes is likely enough to induce death in puny humanoid lifeforms.

Have a nice swim folks.