1,001 Facts That Will Scare the S#*t Out of You: The Ultimate Bathroom Reader (101 page)

John L. Capinera, Encyclopedia of Entomology, 2nd ed. (Springer, 2008).

763

FACT :
Army ants are a half-inch in length and
notorious for dismantling any living thing in their path
, regardless of its size, thanks to massive, machete-like jaws that are half the size of their own bodies.
Army ants are also known as Hilary Swank ants.

Ken Preston-Mafham, The Encyclopedia of Land Invertebrate Behaviour (MIT Press, 1993).

764

FACT :
Army ants earned their name because the entire colony—anywhere from 300,000 to 700,000—is
a mobile battalion
. They don’t make permanent hives like other ants, but bivouac in frequently changing locations.
I bet ants would be thrilled to know that they “bivouac.”

Ken Preston-Mafham, The Encyclopedia of Land Invertebrate Behaviour (MIT Press, 1993).

765

FACT :
Army ants attack cows and horses by swarming up their legs and
attacking the soft tissue of the eyes and nose
. If assaulted while penned, these animals can become so hysterical they will beat themselves to death trying to escape.
I feel the same way at my in-laws’.

Ken Preston-Mafham, The Encyclopedia of Land Invertebrate Behaviour (MIT Press, 1993).

Alzada Carlisle Kistner, An Affair with Africa: Expeditions and Adventures Across a Continent (Island Press, 1998).

766

FACT :
There are dozens of varieties of botfly, each highly adapted to target a specific animal.

Examples include the horse stomach botfly, deer nose botfly and the human botfly. Each breed has a different and elaborate reproductive cycle that
includes a fat, half-inch maggot
embedded in the host creature’s living flesh.

Jerome Goddard, Physician’s Guide to Arthropods of Medical Importance, 5th ed. (CRC Press, 2007).

767

FACT :
The human botfly lays its eggs on a bloodsucking host—like a horsefly or a mosquito—and when this carrier lands on a human,
the botfly maggot emerges and burrows into the human skin
, where it feeds and grows in a sub-dermal cavity for 5–10 weeks.

Jerome Goddard, Physician’s Guide to Arthropods of Medical Importance, 5th ed. (CRC Press, 2007).

768

FACT :
Human botfly larva can grow anywhere in the body, and have been removed from the head, arms, back, abdomen, buttocks, thighs, and armpits of humans.
They can even penetrate the incompletely ossified skull of a young child
and burrow into the brain.
There had better not be a human scrotum botfly.