There are some animal features that just put the heebie-jeebies in us. Even though some of those animals are totally harmless. Did nature evolve “scary” features for a reason? Or is it just the work of the devil? Let’s take a look and see.
TRANSCRIPT:
Whether something is scary-looking or not depends largely on design elements. Take dogs, for example.
There’s the theory that we bonded with their wolf ancestors ages ago because we could see the whites of their eyes. It made us feel safe because that’s what we showed as well.
The whites of the eyes help convey emotion, but when a creature has solid black eyes, something in our minds screams danger. It’s like looking into a void that’s absent of emotion or empathy.
Another design element that induces fright is teeth, or lack of them, in the extreme. A gummy mouth is scary, but a mouth full of sharp teeth is downright devilish. And if they point inward… they look like a trap designed so nothing can escape.
So, eyes and teeth can be scary. Skin texture can also be frightening, especially when it’s pale, wrinkly, and maybe even translucent. It resembles dead skin with those features, and our brain gets repulsed by it, maybe because it reminds us of our own mortality.
An animal can be scary when it’s all mouth, too. No face. Just mouth. Here’s an example: This is the Melibe leonina [muh-LEE-bee lee-oh-NY-nuh]. Oh, that looks cute.
Animals that move weirdly are also scary to us. When they move in ways we can’t predict or understand, it signals danger in our brains because we’re hard-wired to find patterns in nature.
And then if they’re moving with too many or not enough limbs? Get ‘em gone. Just look at a centipede… that thing don’t look right. And this thing, the tongue-eating louse. Yeah, it gets into a fish’s mouth and eats its tongue. Then, it becomes the fish’s tongue. Not today, Satan.
Finally, it’s also scary when there’s a wrongful glow. Like, sometimes you’re looking out in the dark and see two glowing eyes. It’s probably a cat, but maybe… not? And then all those bioluminescent fish at the bottom of the ocean. Unsettling, to say the least.
Not all these elements need to be present in the same creature to make it scary. Just one or two is enough to cause you to crap your pants.
And that’s what artists and designers want you to do when you’re seeing a monster in a movie.
Terryl Whitlatch is a scientifically trained illustrator who has created designs for Lucasfilm. She says that the best monsters draw on reality, saying:
“When you take elements from nature and place them into an imaginary creature you immediately give it a soul, and a hook for the audience to relate to. Taking a human and adding a demonic element is immediately effective. When you think of something horrible, it’s almost inevitably about the worse aspects of human nature.”
She says that H.R. Giger’s Alien is especially frightening because of “the way it combined a skeletal, intestinal design and aspects of a praying mantis, with a jackhammer action that would snap at its victims.”
It’s that fear of spindly insect behavior that’s unnerving to us.
Familiarity is one of the main elements successful movie monster creators include in their designs.
Aaron Sims is an artist and designer whose studio is best known for creating the Demogorgon from Stranger Things.
He says that if a monster is too abstract, we can’t identify with it, and our brains don’t recognize it as a threat. But, he says:
“There are only certain things that, as humans, we identify with that really create fear. It’s things that are familiar to us based on human or animal form, or things that are earthbound. If you take those forms and rearrange them in ways that are abnormal, and the movement is abnormal, a lot of the time you can create something unique and create fear.”
The response to this channel’s animal videos has been iffy, at best. Nevertheless, I persist.
So, let’s categorize some creatures! There are four quadrants for this: Cute and Harmless, Cute and Dangerous, Scary and Harmless, and Scary and Dangerous.
Those actually sound like they profile categories on a dating app.
Cute and Harmless is our feel-good category. That’s where we place animals like the quokka, the axolotl, the dumbo octopus, the pygmy seahorse, and the slow loris.
In the Cute and Dangerous category, we have the platypus, which has a venomous spur on its hind leg. We’ll include the blue-ringed octopus, because even though it’s tiny, it can kill a human in minutes. Same with the puffer fish and the poison dart frog. Cute but deadly, which could be a dating app headline. You’re welcome.
And while we’re at it, let’s move the slow loris from the first category to this one. While it’s cute, it does have a venomous bite.
By the way, did you notice that there are two octopuses on this chart? Octopuses are cephalopods, which were covered on this channel a few years ago. People still talk to this day about how meaningful that script was to their lives. It literally saved marriages, friendships, and souls.
It was so impactful that it’s now included in that warehouse where we’re saving seeds for a future apocalypse. It’ll be the literature we’ll turn to for world-rebuilding.
I still get goosebumps thinking about that script. It’s one of the top three things to ever happen to me in my life.
Speaking of three, we’re on to the third quadrant, the Scary and Harmless category. Here, we’ll plop in the sad and disappointed-in-your-choices-looking blobfish, the aye-aye, and the goliath birdeater, a huge spider that mostly eats bugs and frogs.
Let’s also add in the frilled lizard with its dramatic but harmless neck frill and the star-nosed mole, whose nose looks like… well, use your imagination.
Finally, we come to the Scary and Dangerous category. This is the one where, yeah, these animals aren’t to be messed with. Animals like the saltwater crocodile, the frill shark, and the cassowary, one of the world’s most dangerous birds.
We can also include the cone snail. It has a beautiful shell, but that’s just a front for the snail’s harpoon-like tooth that will inject a cocktail of neurotoxins into you.
The deathstalker scorpion is another animal we can include in this category. Name alone qualifies it, but it can also sting you with a cocktail of neurotoxins.
There are so many animals we could include in each category, but we wanted to list just a few before getting to the real deal: the top-five animals that Satan definitely designed.
Amblypygi is also known as the whip spider or tailless whip scorpion. The name “amblypgid” means “blunt tail” because it doesn’t have a flagellum, which is found in whip scorpions.
They live only about five to ten years and are found in warm tropical and subtropical regions around the world. They’re found during the day in tree crevices, rocky outcroppings, or cliff banks. They’re primarily active at night.
It’s their appearance that makes them scary-looking. They have flattened bodies, two pairs of book lungs, and long, thin legs. Their first pair of legs is super thin and very flexible, like a whip. They act like insect antennae.
They mainly eat insects and other arthropods. Whip spiders have no silk glands or venomous fangs. So, they are harmless to humans.
White-shouldered bats just have that look, you know. That face that you don’t want to come up against in a dark room.
These bats are found in Central America and parts of South America. They mostly live in tropical forests near streams.
They haven’t been well studied, so their food habits are kind of a mystery. But based on their skull and dental structure, they probably mainly eat fruits and maybe some insects.
What makes these animals scary-looking is their short, broad noses and wide mouths. Their eyes also have yellow irises and are large and bulging.
Even though it looks devilish, the white-shoulder bat isn’t dangerous to humans. If anything, it’s more scared of us than we are of them. Probably for the best. Humans are diabolical.
Let’s take a deep dive for this next creature, the Pacific viperfish. As its name suggests, it’s located in the Pacific Ocean, with its range extending from Japan to the Bering Sea and from Alaska to Baja California and the Gulf of California.
It swims in the ocean’s twilight and midnight zones. Together, that’s two hundred to four thousand meters underwater.
Its teeth are what make it scary-looking. They’re needle-like and are key to their hunting strategy. The two front fangs jut up from the fish’s bottom jaw, past its own eyes.
When the viperfish unhinges its jaws, its mouth opens wide enough to engulf prey, while the teeth form a cage to prevent escape.
It mainly eats invertebrates and fish, including crustaceans and arrow worms.
Because they’re found so far deep in the ocean, they’re not dangerous to humans. That said, if you pick one up, you may get poked by its fangs.
Up next is a centipede. And not the arcade kind. This is the Peruvian giant yellow-leg centipede, also known as the Amazonian giant centipede.
It’s the world’s largest centipede species, with a length exceeding thirty centimeters. It’s found in various places throughout South America and the extreme south Caribbean. You can find them in dark, moist places like leaf litter or under rocks and logs. They’re also great at climbing and will hide under the bark in trees.
What makes them scary is… well, just look at it. It’s creepy-looking, with all those tiny feet that let it crawl anywhere. Imagine that moving up your back in the middle of the night.
It preys on a wide variety of animals, including other arthropods, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. Its venom is potent enough to immobilize small animals, and it’s secreted from a modified pair of legs underneath its head.
While their bites are rarely fatal, they’re still dangerous to humans. In 2014, a four-year-old child in Venezuela died after being bitten by one that was hidden inside an open soda can.
Finally, we come to the tapeworm, a gnarly-looking parasite that you probably don’t think about much.
In humans, three types of tapeworms can cause taeniasis [tee-NYE-uh-sis], which is an intestinal infection. They’re the beef tapeworm, the pork tapeworm, and the Asian tapeworm. Beef and pork tapeworms are found worldwide and can be found in raw or undercooked meat.
Tapeworms live in the digestive tract and ducts of their hosts. They have long, white bodies, with sizes ranging from a few centimeters to twenty-five meters.
A tapeworm doesn’t have a mouth or digestive tract of its own. Instead, it has a layer of hair-like filaments throughout its body wall surface that absorbs nutrients from its host. Once it’s in your digestive tract, it attaches its head to the inner wall of the intestine and eats what you eat.
While not always dangerous to humans, they can cause major problems. If they grow large enough, they can block the appendix, causing appendicitis. They can also migrate and form cysts in other organs, like the lungs or liver, that stop their normal functioning.
If you get a tapeworm, go see your doctor immediately. Also, stay away from raw beef.
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