How’d you like to spend Christmas on Christmas Island?  Sounds nice, doesn’t it?  Warm sunny days, sandy beaches, tropical forests, what’s not to like?  Well, if you’re not a fan of creepy-crawlies, you might want to avoid this island paradise, since Christmas Island is home to the world’s largest land dwelling invertebrate, the coconut crab.

Although coconut crabs do eat coconuts (they climb up trees and break open the fruit with their massive claws), they aren’t a significant part of their diet.  These arthropods also eat other fruits, nuts, seeds, and the occasional dead animal, such as other crabs, baby tortoises, and cats.  In fact, coconut crabs will eat just about anything, and as a result are thought to be the reason no one has ever found the remains of Amelia Earhart.

Coconut crabs are fairly unusual.  They are part of the hermit crab family, yet only the young ones wear shells.  They need water to survive, but will drown if fully submerged.  These crabs can also live up to 60 years, spending most of that time in their burrows, only coming out to feed and breed.  However, there is an exception to that rule.  Sometimes coconut crabs will break into houses and steal flatware and other shiny utensils, which has led to its other name, the robber crab.

Some explorer in Southeast Asia saw this enormous beetle (up to 4 inches long), and instead of fleeing in terror, decided that it reminded them of a violin.  Thus, the violin beetle was named.

Since the violin beetle lives in rainforests, which are some of the most diverse habitats on the planet, there are a lot of animals that would like to eat this beetle.  This results in two adaptations.  One is the shape- violin beetles are flat and brown, mimicking a dead leaf, so potential predators will ignore it.  The other is a little stranger- violin beetles secrete a poisonous acid that is strong enough to numb a human hand.

While the violin beetle is strictly carnivorous, this acid isn’t used as a weapon for hunting.  This is because both the larval and the adult stages of this beetle feed on other insect larvae, which are pretty much defenseless against the beetle’s fearsome set of jaws.

The Isabella Tiger Moth is a lovely yellowish-orange moth that lives throughout North America.  It is unremarkable, except for the fact that it only has a few day to find a mate and reproduce after it pupates.  This is not what this entry is about, though.  The larval stage of this moth is commonly known as the wooly bear caterpillar, and it is a remarkable insect.  

Not only can it be used to predict the weather (the smaller the orange band is, the colder the winter will be), it has the ability to become frozen solid and thaw out completely unharmed.  This unusual adaptation is the result of living in the arctic, where temperatures easily reach -40°F in the winter.

Another feature of the wooly bear caterpillar is that it has a relatively long lifespan for an insect. The summers in the arctic are short, so the caterpillar doesn’t have much time to eat enough food to pupate. This means that the caterpillar takes several years (14 in one case) to reach the optimum size to create a cocoon and hatch into a moth.

If you were to pick one bug to be afraid of, it shouldn’t be spiders, centipedes, or even cockroaches. These invertebrates may have too many legs, or be lurking inside your home, but they are definitely more scared of you than you are of them.  No, the bug (an insect, to be precise) you should fear is Vespa mandarinia, the Asian giant hornet.

As its name implies, the Asian giant hornet is a hornet that lives in eastern Asia, and can be more than two inches long, the biggest of any other hornet.  This hornet also possesses a stinger that is a quarter inch long, which is an eighth of their own body length.  The venom delivered by the Asian giant hornet’s sting is extremely painful, contains a neurotoxin, and can cause renal failure, anaphylactic shock, cardiac arrest, and even death, if the person is stung enough.  This was the case in 2013, when 42 people died and 1,600 more were injured in the Shaanxi Province of China.

Did you know that the Asian giant hornet is also kind of lazy?  It will chase a person 600 feet if they’ve been stung (if one hornet stings someone, it attracts others, which will also attack), but it won’t build its own nest.  Yes, it will construct the combs to store food and larvae, but Asian giant hornets prefer to live underground and usually choose to find an empty burrow to move into rather than dig their own.  Occasionally, the burrow they pick is still inhabited, but this is no problem for this aggressive hornet; they simply swarm the unfortunate animal and sting it until it runs away or dies.

Asian giant hornets are voracious predators, but they have a problem.  The adults can’t digest solid protein.  There is a way around this, though.  The larvae of this hornet can eat the solids, so the adults will kill various insects (like mantises, other hornets, and their personal favorite, bees), chew them into a paste, and feed that to the larvae.  The larvae will then produce a clear liquid that is loaded with protein and in turn feed that to the adults.

Let’s go back to the bees for a moment.  As previously stated, Asian giant hornets adore bees, especially honey bees, which can be quite a problem for people running bee farms.  A single hornet can kill 40 bees in a minute, a small group of hornets (under 50) can exterminate an entire colony of bees (tens of thousands) in under an hour.  While there are manmade methods of keeping these hornets from decimating bee hives, the bees have come up with their own unique solution.  In order to find a bee hive, the Asian giant hornets must send out a scout.  When the bees discover the scout, they surround it before it can report back. The bees will then vibrate their flight muscles to produce heat, raising the temperature inside the bee-ball to 115°F. The hornet quickly succumbs to the heat and lack of oxygen within the ball and is disposed of by the resourceful bees.  

Vampyroteuthis infernalis literally translates as ‘vampire squid from hell’, a description which that could not be any further from the truth concerning this specific cephalopod.  For one thing, the vampire squid (as it is commonly known) isn’t even a squid; it’s a living fossil, the only surviving member of its order, and combines characteristics of both squid (fins for propulsion) and octopuses (eight arms).  It’s not particularly hellish, either.  Yes, the coloration of this invertebrate ranges from blood red to pitch black, but it is completely harmless; the largest vampire squid ever recorded wasn’t even a foot long.  This little guy couldn’t hurt you if it tried.

The only thing even remotely frightening about the vampire squid is its defense mechanism.  When startled, vampire squids pull their arms back over their heads, revealing a dark cloak covered in spines.  The ‘cloak’ is actually the webbing between the cephalopod’s arms, and is reminiscent of a vampire drawing up its cape, hence the name, while the ‘spines’ are actually modified suction cups called cirri, and are fleshy.  This defense mechanism is sometimes called the pineapple posture.

Because it lives at depths of 3,000 feet, the vampire squid has developed many unusual adaptations. For instance, they have the largest eye to body ratio of any animal, which can be quite useful when trying to navigate the near black waters of the lower pelagic zone.  Since the water pressure is so great here, this cephalopod’s body is extremely gelatinous, more like a jellyfish than that of a squid or octopus.  

The vampire squid is also the only cephalopod that is not an active hunter.  It has two retractable filaments that are trailed behind it as it swims. They can be eight times longer than the vampire squid’s body and are covered in mucus, so any bit of marine detritus that come in contact with them will stick and eventually eaten.  These filaments are a basal feature and are unique to this cephalopod; in octopuses, the filaments have completely disappeared, but in squids, they have evolved into elongated feeding tentacles.

If you can imagine a slug covered in armor like a pill bug, you’ve got a pretty good idea of what a chiton is.  A chiton is a type of marine mollusk that is found in oceans across the world.  They don’t get very big (the largest chiton only gets about a foot long) and stick to the sea floor, where they crawl around eating algae off of the rocks.  The lined chiton makes its home in the northern Pacific ocean, with its habitat stretching from Russia and Japan to Alaska and California.  

Lined chitons come in a variety of colors, but they all share the same pattern; fine stripes on each of their eight shell plates.  This particular chiton is less than 2 inches long, but that doesn’t stop it from defending itself.  Like all others of its kind, if disturbed, the lined chiton will curl up into a ball (or as close to a ball as it can get) to protect its vulnerable underside.

Chitons also have a really cool way of eating.  All mollusks, from snails and slugs to squids and scallops, have a specialized tongue covered in teeth, called a radula, that they use to scrape plant matter (or flesh, if they’re carnivorous) into their mouths.  As mentioned earlier, chitons eat algae.  But, this isn’t the green scummy stuff that grows in your fish tank; this algae is hard, like the rocks it grows on.  This means that the regular toothed tongue just won’t cut it, so chitons take it up a notch.  

The lined chiton radular teeth are made of magnetite (a mineral made of iron), as are every other chiton species, making them unique among animals.  Scientists also think that the metallic teeth also help chitons navigate by using the earth’s magnetic field, which can be useful when you don’t have real eyes.

It lives throughout the world’s tropics, coming out only at night to hunt.  It is an ambush predator, waiting for its unsuspecting prey to come close enough to be caught in its net.  Its body is only an inch long.  It is… the ogre faced spider.

Deinopis subrufa (aka the rufous net-casting spider) is a species of ogre faced spider that lives in parts of Australia and Tasmania.  The scientific name is a mixture of Greek and Latin, which roughly translates as ‘slightly reddish’ (for the coloration of the females, which are also slightly larger than the males) ‘terrible appearance’ (hence the common name of ogre faced).

Ogre faced spiders are different from other spiders.  They do have eight eyes, but two of them have become so large (to help them see at night) that the other six are hard to see.  They do spin webs, but they also take it up a notch, and create nets.  The ogre faced spider will then hang close to the ground and wait for something to walk (or fly) by, and then throw the net at it. Unlike the web, the net isn’t sticky, but insects and other spiders will still get tangled up in it and eaten.

If the prospect of a spider using something other than a net to hunt absolutely horrifies you, do not look up trapdoor (or fishing, bolas, spitting, and funnel web) spiders and remember that these small spiders are 100% harmless.  There have been zero recorded ogre faced spider bites on humans in the history of everything.  That doesn’t stop them from looking freaky, though.

Despite its name, the hummingbird clearwing is actually a moth.  It does look like a hummingbird, though, and acts like one, too.  This moth can be found throughout North America and spends most of its day hovering around flowers (preferably ones that are pink or purple), using its long proboscis to extract the nectar that it survives on.

While it is easy to mistake the hummingbird clearwing for an actual hummingbird (size, behavior, and coloration classify it as a hummingbird mimic), this remarkable moth does have some variations.  Some are solid green, some have colored abdomens, and some are black and yellow, which leads some to believe that they are giant bumblebees.  

Perhaps the most interesting features of these creatures are its wings.  When they first emerge from their cocoon, the wings of the hummingbird clearwing are a solid red or black.  This all changes when the moth decides to test out its new two inch wings. As it flaps, colored scales fall off, leaving the moth with the distinctive transparent patches that give it its name.  Interestingly, hummingbird clearwings in the north and west end up with a smooth border between the scales and the membrane of the wing, while the ones in the south and east exhibit jagged wing borders.

The name of the Antarctic giant isopod is a bit of a misnomer.  Yes it is an isopod, and yes it does live in the ocean by Antarctica (it’s called the Southern Ocean, if you were wondering), but it’s not giant.  Its average length of 3.5 inches makes it bigger than the average animal that lives in the freezing oxygen poor waters near the South Pole, but it’s absolutely miniscule compared to some other isopod species, which can be more than a foot long.  

Because there isn’t enough sunlight to support plant matter in the mesopelagic zone (200-1000 feet below sea level), Antarctic giant isopods are carnivorous.  They are mostly scavengers, feeding off any carrion that drifts down to their depth, but will also eat small sponges and fish.  Even though they usually don’t actively hunt down prey, Glyptonotus antarcticus is one of the few isopods that can swim.  And if that wasn’t strange enough, the Antarctic giant isopod actually swims upside-down.

In the rare event that this isopod is attacked by something large enough to do damage, it can curl up into a ball to protect itself, just like its terrestrial cousins the wood lice (aka roly polies and pill bugs) do.  The Antarctic giant isopod can also use its four spiny legs as a defense mechanism, raising them up and waving them around to look bigger.  Mothers-to-be prefer to avoid direct confrontation; after they have laid their eggs (the biggest of any marine invertebrate) into a special brood pouch, the females of this species will bury themselves in the sand and wait for their young to hatch.  Luckily, the Antarctic giant isopod has a slow metabolism, so the mother doesn’t starve to death during this process.

What if I told you that there is an animal that can be found in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, is carnivorous, has 15 sets of legs, and is probably IN YOUR HOUSE RIGHT NOW AND IT LOOKS LIKE THIS!!

Although it may look like some sort of alien monster, it’s actually the humble house centipede. They’re relatively harmless (most of these arthropods couldn’t hurt you if they tried due to their tiny teeth) and eat the bugs you should really be worrying about (aka cockroaches, termites, silverfish, and bedbugs).  House centipedes don’t carry disease, don’t destroy your property, and try to stay out of people’s way.  

The body of a house centipede is only about an inch long, but thanks to those ridiculously long legs and antennae, it can look much bigger.  It also spends a significant amount of time keeping those legs clean. Like a cat, it will groom itself, meticulously making sure that everything is in proper order.  So next time you see one of these centipedes crawling out of your drain, try not to scream or panic, and remember that this is one bug that you don’t want to squish.