5

Blackbirds That Blot Out the Sky

wave3

Generally speaking, when clouds turn into pitch-black, seething masses that rain toxic feces on the world, that's an indication of the end of times. But for the folks in La Grange, Kentucky, that's how they know there's still six more weeks of winter.

In recent years, tens of thousands of migrating black birds have descended on the town of La Grange in a literal shitstorm. Each morning and night throughout the winter, they fly over the community and produce so much poop that people have to walk around with umbrellas.

And while migrating birds showering a town in feces is objectively hilarious, the real-life consequences of all that shit is a little less funny. It's destroying cars and making people sick. Some people suffer from respiratory issues, and a huge chunk of the population gets pinkeye all at the same time each year (we only said the consequences would be a little less funny).

louisville
And a lot more Independence Day.

4

Huge Asian Carp That Fling Themselves at You

Nerissa Michaels

In the long list of animals that could amass into a horrifying and deadly mob, carp are somewhere near the bottom. In terms of threat level, they sit squarely between teacup pigs and coral. The only way that a carp infestation could be anything other than benign is if they somehow grew to be monstrous in size and started throwing themselves at humans. Which, as you can see from the above photo, is exactly what has happened with the Asian carp in rivers and lakes around the U.S.

Asian Carp Regional Coordinating Committee
"Wow! Dinner and a serious concussion, all in one package!"

3

Angry Wild Turkeys

theepochtimes

2

An Emergency-Scale Caterpillar Explosion

lancs.ac.uk

Caterpillars, like zombies, are slow-moving hunks of flesh with a single-minded goal of consuming. Alone they are harmless, but when they number in the millions, they are terrifying and inescapable. The difference, however, is that zombies are fictional, while caterpillars are real enough to cause a national emergency for an entire country.

The African armyworm has devastated crops, poisoned water supplies and presumably forced survivors onto the roofs of malls with only one gun. Already considered one of the most destructive pests on Earth, now that their numbers are swelling at such an astronomical rate, it's caused Liberia to issue a state of emergency.

nydailynews
It's not like they have other, more pressing things to attend to.

The biggest problem is that the adult moths can lay around 1,000 eggs in one lifetime, and they can migrate hundreds of miles, essentially making the outbreak an airborne crisis. They are also good at avoiding pesticides by burrowing into the ground before pupating. As a result, there are tens of millions of them ravaging entire fields of crops, all moving together in unison to new food sources ... kind of like an army.

lancs.ac.uk
These are just the ground troops.

The infestation has spread to over a hundred villages and towns in Guinea, Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast, infesting more than 50 villages in less than a week. With that kind of speed, they could devastate entire sections of a country in an alarmingly short amount of time. And the armyworms have already been spotted in the United States.

jjpanick
The wormocalypse, coming to an everywhere near you.

1

Hordes of Giant African Snails

CBS

From a completely unscientific perspective, snails are just snot in a shell. They're slow, slimy and filled with diseases. You probably don't spend much time thinking about them until you hear that sickly crunch under your foot while walking down the sidewalk after a rainstorm. But that's because you haven't encountered the giant African land snail, which eats the walls off of houses.

Getty
On the other hand, they make great wallpaper paste.

The Department of Agriculture has declared Miami "ground zero" for a giant snail invasion that's causing problems for thousands of residents. An average snail is only a few centimeters long and goes unnoticed, but the giant snails in Florida can grow up to 18 centimeters long, and they eat just about everything. The snails' diet can include about 500 different types of plants, which is causing hell for agriculture in Miami. Aside from vegetation, the snails are also partial to stucco, so they are just as likely to destroy a garden as the exterior wall of your house.

And then shit all over it.

It's proving tough to get rid of the things, too: Each snail can lay up to 1,200 eggs a year. Florida's Department of Agriculture's solution to the problem? They're going door to door and picking up the snails in people's yards. That's it. They're just collecting them in plastic bags and putting them into a "deep freeze" because ... we have no idea why. Maybe in case we ever need to thaw them out in the future to stop Wesley Snipes in some Demolition Man scenario?

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Salt those bad boys up and you could take the French junk food industry by storm.

Still, there's no way the Department of Agriculture can keep up with the breeding of the snails. So, to reiterate, we have an infestation that causes meningitis, and eats crops and houses. And it's spreading.

Getty
"Hey, I demand citizenship!"

Maybe we should just cover Florida in salt and call it a day.

Erik Germ is the owner of HugeFrigginArms and thinks it would be awesome if you followed him on Twitter.

For more species we need to kill with fire, check out 6 Animals Humanity Accidentally Made Way Scarier and 5 Species That Seem to be Trying to Take over the Earth.

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