The Weird and Wonderful World of Bugs

I have never grown out of my fascination with bugs since I was a little kid, so I present to you the weirdest list of bugs I could find on the internet. Personally, I also think they’re cute, but then I’m a tad weird myself.

Let’s start with the first strange guy on the list – The Man Faced Stink Bug. If this guy doesn’t make you smile when you’re having a dreadful day, I don’t know what will happen. It is a cashew pest from Madagascar and Asia with an orange body. It has either two or four spots that look like eyes and a short protuberance that looks like a man’s nose. Hence, the poor stink bug’s name. If you’re going to be a stink bug, at least you can be a cute one like this little dude.

Next on our list is the Giraffe Weevil. This weevil is from Africa and South Asia. True to its name, it has an extraordinarily long neck, three times as long as its body. It’s a type of leaf roller with a long black neck and a black head with a red body (elytra.) The males have longer necks to fight over the females, but the females need their long necks to be able to bend in position to move their rolled leaves. They are two to three inches long, and their necks are three times as long as their bodies. Talk about awkward! These creatures look like they shouldn’t even exist!

If that isn’t awkward enough for you, you could be the poor Behemoth Moth. They have these weird hairs or coremata to signal to females with their pheromones and entice them to mate. They are huge and beautiful, but if I were a female moth I’d find their size intimidating.

I’d rather be a ghost mantis. Those guys are cool. They mimic dry leaves and live in Africa along The Ivory Coast, living in shrublands, small bushes, and vegetation. They are dark or red brown or tan and totally cool. They really look like dead leaves! Just look at them! How cool are they?

The ghost mantis is less freaky than the Antarctic Scale Worm. That’s for sure. This bug looks like something that belongs to an alien movie. They are seven inches long, eyeless, with a gold proboscis that looks like a retractable head (freaky, if you ask me,) and a tubular mouth that sucks up food. Holy hell from the depths of the deep Batman! These things are ugly as sin, in my humble opinion and I would NOT want to meet one in person anywhere. They are so gross looking.

So is the hammerhead worm. And these are invasive, and we are supposed to kill them in the USA, if we find them anywhere, but that just seems cruel. How would you like to be minding your own bug business and someone just comes along and offs you like you’re Al Capone? These worms are like the hammerhead shark, which is their namesake and grow up to fifteen inches, normally eight to twelve inches long. That’s right. I said they can grow up to fifteen inches long. YIKES! They have one to five dark dorsal stripes that also identify as them as scary as fuck.

Now the violin beetle is not scary, in fact, it’s just weird and totally cool. If you play the violin, you might hold a special place in your heart for this cool bug. It is 2.4-4 inches and is a type of ground beetle found under trees. The creepy thing about this beetle is it can spray nitric acid and ammonia from its abdomen to burn people’s eyes. Okay, so, it’s not as cute as it seems after all. Take note. Do not bother with a violin beetle, no matter how neat they look.

Finally, I give you the wax tailed bug, which is 3.25 inches long and lives in Mexico and Central America. This truly bizarre critter in the nymph stage produces a waxy secretion from the glands in its abdomen and elsewhere to protect its eggs. It eats tree sap.

Out of all these bugs, which one would you prefer to be, if given the choice? I’d stick with the ghost mantis because it seems to be the most normal of the bunch. Just looking like a dried leaf is nothing compared to having an elongated bent neck, nitric acid spray coming out from my abdomen, or being a creepy hammerhead worm. Until next time, don’t have a metamorphosis and be careful what you pick up on vacation or dig up in your yard.

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Nora B. Peevy is a cat trapped in a human’s body. Please send help or tuna. She has a Bachelor of Arts in English Degree with a Concentration in Creative Writing from Cardinal Stritch University and is an Olympic champion sleeper, toiling away for JournalStone/Trepidatio Publishing as a submissions reader and a reviewer for Hellnotes. She is also reading screenplays for the Lovecraft Film Festival again this year. Her first novelette, For the Sake of Brigid was released in May of 2024 and her first novel, Flesh Eating Turtles! will be coming out later this year. Her quirky stories are published in Eighth Tower Press, Weird Fiction Quarterly, Obsidian Butterfly, and other presses. You can find her on Facebook (as Onyx Brightwing), her blog, She Writes Fast | A blog for writers and readers (wordpress.com), and on Slasher as @Sekhautet. She naps in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.