The war on Christmas is over. Everyone just gave up in disgust. They read this story about reindeer parasites, complete with burrowing snot flies, vaginal maggot guns, and people picking maggots out of their eyes, and decided it just wasn’t worth it any more.
What kind of gun should I get to pick off flying reindeer? I’m thinking of spending Christmas Eve patrolling the neighborhood and making sure none of those diseased vermin get anywhere near my house.
Nature is always more horrific than anything we can dream up. Why is it, though, that it must be small insects and bugs that seem to dominate in using other animals to reproduce? Bot flies and wasps! Why, nature, why?
There is a passage from Steven Erikson’s Deadhouse Gates (I’m fairly sure it’s Deadhouse Gates) wherein a couple characters are assaulted by what are basically super bot flies that lay eggs everywhere on a person they can get, which hatch in seconds and disfigure or kill the host. Nature is the farrow field for our nightmares.
at first it does freak me out when I think about things like parasitism, I mean Oh Wow!?
but we all depend on other things for life we eat plants and animals, not many live forms do not take advantage in some way other life forms for survival.
I does not appear that life or nature favors any life form at all. it only favors the continuation and spread of life regardless of from. and none are truly separate from any of the others. forms come and go, processes change, modes of being adapt we walk upon a vast grave yard of extinction floating as it were on a cushion and are as ephemeral as a soap bubble. We are certainly not the “crown of creation”
thoughts for the longest night
uncle frogy
Learn from my mistake. Don’t Google image search “nasal bot fly”.
But hey, nature was intelligently designed by a loving, compassionate god who has a plan for every one of his special snowflakes. What do you mean you can’t see it? Isn’t it obvious?
Taking that question seriously, the answer is quite obvious: Because when you’re using other creatures as hosts for your offspring, it doesn’t really make sense to use organisms that are smaller than yourself… seeing as how there’s not enough room in them.
Also, if you leave a big part of your reproductive equipment to other organisms, you can afford to be much smaller yourself.
And that ties in with a general r strategy; spending more energy on producing offspring, rather than growing bigger. There’s a lot of synergy between these points, which is probably why this approach is still around.
Vaginal guns and anal spiracles, oh my! Yikes.
> What kind of gun should I get to pick off flying reindeer?
Remington makes some good semi-auto shotguns. For something that big that flies, I would suggest magnum shells loaded with #1 or #2 buckshot.
Googling “vaginal gun” turned up for me a new meaning to concealed carry.
I do remember someone once describing another person as “having the morals of a wasp” (not W.A.S.P.) and I always thought it was a delicious little put-down. I spent the rest of the evening wondering if the person was in the habit of laying eggs in other people’s children, perhaps, or maybe they were a capitalist.
Octavia Butler. Bloodchild. Still gives me the creeps decades later.
Dibs on the band name!
grendelsfather @ 13
And the genre would be feminist death metal?
To keep these disease and parasite ridden vermin away from yer cheeses, guns won’t work. Assuming you do manage to shoot some down, all that means is the diseased, parasite-filled corpse is now closer to the cheeses. Similarly, blowing them up in midair with, say, surface- or drone-launched missiles won’t be much help, all that does is spread the disease- and parasite-filled debris over a wider area. Of course, you could use nuclear warheads, which do tend to sterilize, but they will very probably also sterilize the cheeses. Bit of an own goal, that…
However, sterilization is what you want. Just a bit more targeted. Hence, the mildly deranged penguin suggests, go for air-to-air incineration. Mount a flamethrower on yer drone, buzz up behind the bugger, and do a dragon impersonation. Has the additional advantages of making bright lights and LOUD! noises (always important, she insists), thus adding to the squidmess spirit, plus keeping you warm.
(Only reindeer were incinerated when testing this advice. Well, and a few horses too. May have contained nuts.)
Phased plasma rifle in the 40 watt range.
Johnny Vector @ 12:
Octavia Butler, in an afterword on Bloodchild:
Drinking coffee, biting into a toasty muffin, perusing my usual dozen or so websites and blogs and then, whammo, snot flies. Okay, biology can be weird, I get it, but the bigger mystery for me is: Dr. Myers, HTH do you find this stuff?
Seems fair to me. We’re parasites as far as our planet is concerned.
Zebrafisk are so boring…
(Actually, Dr Meyers is an alien snotfly from the planet octop—, who sends his evil creations to a malfunctioning 4-D hologram on Earth named “poopyhead” (frequently mispelled “Dr Myers”) for unclear reasons, but probably has something to do with peas.) –or at least that’s my current hypothesis, to be replaced by something else when I think of it.
Holy Hopping Jeebus, imagine what the Great A’Tuin has burrowing around with all that dung on his back?! Enough to put you off mythical beasts.
Any interesting parasites in cute polar bears?