There is a particularly disturbing trend among some species of animal to evolve features on their bodies that look eerily like human faces, presumably to earn our trust so they can get close enough to lay 5,000 eggs in our ear canal.
Photos.com
Shield bugs, also known as chust bugs and (less flatteringly) stink bugs, are a type of insect characterized by a triangular plate on their back that resembles a shield. This shield is often painted up like a friendly Tiki mask, presumably in an attempt to discourage us from killing them on sight. Some attempt to charm us by looking like a jaundiced Ronald Reagan:
Joseph Chu
Or Elvis Presley's guest appearance on The Simpsons.
Others exploit our love for grumpy Disney sidekicks:
Oddee
And look vaguely like a Hutt's clitoris.
And still others look like racist vaudeville ghosts:
Quality Junkyard
"If you squash me, I will haunt you with hackneyed comedy routines steeped in bigotry."
Marie-Lan Nguyen
Say hello to the Mickey Rooney of the animal kingdom.
Legend has it that Japanese sailors who drowned during the battle of Dan-no-ura still walk the floor of the Inland Sea, reincarnated in the bodies of scuttling anger crabs that shamble around scaring the absolute bugshit out of anyone unfortunate enough to lay eyes on them.
Historum
They're upset because they were hoping to be reborn as something with tentacles.
Carl Sagan once suggested that these crabs might have deliberately evolved their appearance to keep people from eating them, seeing as how fishermen over the centuries probably made a habit of throwing anything back that even remotely resembled the anguished face of a drowning demon. Sagan's theory should be taken with a grain of salt, because he was an astrophysicist/cosmologist, and his line of expertise didn't have a single fucking thing to do with crabs.
Open Cage
Though we admit, it would be tremendously difficult to eat something that looks perpetually caught in the throes of a massive shuddering dump.
In what should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, nature saw fit to paint demon clown faces on the goddamn abdomens of a handful of species of goddamn spiders, because the world is a cold and desolate place.
The above image, captured by Ukranian photographer Igor Ryabov in his backyard, looks like the universe suddenly decided to tap into our joint fear of spiders and serial killers who wear makeup on their burlap murder masks. The only way this spider could do a better job of exploiting our most terrible phobias is if he were riding a snake through a dentist's office. Or if he looked like this:
Clearly, clearly, that is a spider carrying the flayed spirit of Pumpkinhead on its back. There's no way any divine power or cosmic force could create that horror by accident. It looks like two nightmares teamed up to rob you of every night of sleep for the rest of your life.
And then we have this spider, running around with the face of a skeletal alien banshee airbrushed on its ass:
People's Daily Online, Before It's News
We apologize for the PTSD, abduction survivors.
Presumably this spider sneaked onto our planet in a bushel of intergalactic bananas back when some interdimensional travelers stopped by to help us build Stonehenge or the pyramids or whatever, and now they're just waiting around for the right time to take over the planet like the villain in Stargate.
E. Reid Ross
277 Comments