Slime is irrefutable proof that hell is real...and really gross.
It's sticky, gooey, icky, and usually produced by something just as nasty.
"Venkman!
What happened?
Are you Okay?
"He slimed me.
That's great!
Actual physical contact."
The very thought of slime is enough to make most people feel queasy.
So naturally, you should watch an entire video about the grossest real-life slime attacks
in the world.
Let's get started.
Highway hagfish
Found all around the globe, hagfish are deep sea monsters that look the way unhappiness
feels.
And when they aren't busy being ugly, the underwater monstrosities are spewing slimy
gunk all over the place.
But why?
Why would anything be that disgusting?
There are actually two reasons the fish spew goo.
First, it makes them taste disgusting.
In human terms, it's like blowing your nose in a bear's mouth.
Second, when hagfish get the munchies, they coat their meal with mucus so nothing else
will eat it.
Again, this is like blowing your nose on your lunch to show everyone it's yours.
And that's just fine when the fish are in the ocean, but in July 2017, a truck transporting
7,500 pounds of those ocean gremlins tipped over and lost its load, hemorrhaging snot
snakes all over the place.
This caused five drivers to crash into each other as fish mucus engulfed them and their
unlucky stretch of highway.
On the bright side...just kidding, there… there is no bright side.
Glue velvet
Put the word "velvet" in something's name, and it automatically sounds warm and friendly.
It almost makes you hate everything that's not made out of velvet.
So you'd be forgiven for assuming that "velvet worm" describes anything but a soulless harbinger
of bug murder.
Unfortunately, that's exactly what it is.
To trap their prey, velvet worms unleash a torrent of sticky slime, then stab their victims
with a mandible dagger to liquefy the bug's insides.
Recent experiments showed that the velvet worm pulls off its spray attack via contracting
ducts that squeeze mucus through a narrow conduit.
If that freaks you out, just steer clear of the little devils.
They're typically found in Australia, New Zealand, the tropics, and on the back of your
neck right now.
Spidey sneeze
People like to compare spitting spiders to Spider-Man, because nothing in this world
is sacred.
The two basically have nothing in common.
For example, spitting spiders look silly in glasses.
More importantly, Spider-Man doesn't doesn't spray his meals with venomous slime.
Spitting spiders have an extra web duct which contains a cocktail of silk, glue, and venom.
Once they pick a bug from Nature's menu, they position their fangs like tiny pistols and
bombard their target with death paste.
The lethal slime stream travels at up to 62 miles per hour and contracts on contact, sealing
both the victim and its fate.
It's hard to imagine anything worse than a machine gun arachnid with toxic ammo.
But Nature has already invented a scarier alternative: machine gun arachnids that hunt
together.
According to National Geographic, Singaporean spitting spiders hunt in groups when they're
young.
Once they're old enough to leave the web, younglings work together to massacre prey
in units of four or more.
That's horrifying to imagine.
So let's look at that funny spider with glasses instead.
Shell shock
Snails typically resemble living eye crust and move like cold molasses.
But not all of them fit that description.
Case in point: the worm-snail, which doesn't move at all and still manages to be grosser
than every other snail combined.
See, because worm-snails don't move, Nature has armed the immobile gastropods with two
wriggly appendages that cast mucus nets.
When a microorganism gets caught in a net, the worm-snail sucks the whole thing back
into its mouth.
Gut buster
Florida is the Noah's Ark of invasive species.
Everything from giant pythons to stucco-eating snails has settled there, causing all manner
of mayhem.
Of the Sunshine State's many intruders, the New Guinea flatworm easily qualifies as one
of the nastiest.
A mere 2 inches in length, the creature sounds completely unassuming, but as outlined by
the Miami Herald, it's a Pandora's box of biological horror.
The flatworm wears a coat of toxic ooze and hosts a brain parasite that's communicable
to humans.
To eat prey, these flatworms cough up their own stomachs, which ooze deadly acid.
That comes in handy for their favorite meal: snails.
To bypass snail shells, they simply puke their guts out and let their innards drip into the
shell's opening.
Remember Florida's stucco-eating snails?
Those things are the length of human hands, and New Guinea flatworms gang up in packs
of 30 to 40 to eat them.
Go ahead and take a moment to digest that thought.
"You see something down there chief?"
"No I just think I'm gonna barf."
Killer pitcher
Plants are generally only useful as either decorations or salad — or both if you're
a cat.
But that portrait of harmlessness fades pretty fast once you enter the world of carnivorous
plants.
"Wait wait wait…!"
Native to tropical Asia, pitcher plants are nature's lethal ale horns.
Only, rather than holding alcohol, they just make you want to drink to forget.
Any creature unfortunate enough to enter the plant slides helplessly into a pit of digestive
slime that dissolves the victim and swallows it like quicksand.
The more it resists, the faster it sinks into oblivion.
And if that wasn't horrifying enough, at least one species of pitcher plant in the Philippines
has a slime bath strong enough to devour full-sized rats.
You'll never look at flowers the same way again.
The ant-churean candidate
The life cycle of the lancet liver fluke is kind of like a romantic comedy if you replace
John Cusack with a slime ball and some brain damage.
So, more like an Adam Sandler comedy.
"Ha."
Lancet liver flukes begin life as eggs in cow poop.
When a snail eats the poop, the eggs infect the snail, which now has to expend energy
encasing baby parasites in slime balls.
Ants then come along and eat the slime balls, because why wouldn't they?
That's where things get brainwashy.
The young flukeworms take over their new hosts' brains and force the ants to climb atop blades
of grass.
That's effectively suicide , since grazing animals can then eat them, allowing the parasites
to spread to new hosts.
Who knows?
Maybe even you...
"We could be infested with these things- hiccup.
We got to keep an eye out for any zany wacky characters that pop up.
"Oooh wee!
Whatever you want Rick!
We're here to help."
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