Cockroaches on the hand, not scary at all, but I feel disgusted by them.
And large spiders, extremely scary to me, instant fear response.
Interesting watch about what babies fear.
I believe that things like fear of needles is something passed on from parents.
Smaller spiders scared me when I was younger, but I have overcome that phobia significantly. Large, hairy, distinctly arthropodic spiders, though...? Yuck.
Answers I've seen to this question tend to vary wildly.
I'm not terribly afraid of real spiders though. Hairy crawling spiders like wolf spiders and tarantulas don't really bother me at all. It's the ones with the big web-spinning butts that dangle and drop down from above that make me go straight into fight-or-flight.
Cockroaches are just, like someone else said, disgusting to me, especially if they are at home. If they are outside I could not be bothered.
And when I see a cockroach fly the disgust is multiplied by like ten.
I grew up with children and people in Northern Australia that had zero fear of snakes and spiders with plenty of exposure to both.
When I was 13 a friend of my sister, a large imposing Torres Strait Islander girl, visited and saw a cat for the very first time and screamed fit to break glass while jumping back to break the wall panel and up onto the couch.
This was someone comfortable handling large live mud crabs on the floor, gutting fish, handling snakes and killing them, etc.
As in "Cop scared by mannequin":
I guess that's this new UK laws in effect? How can I prove I'm old enough to watch some giant snakes? :)
The following is what I'm seeing exactly, and because it still happens it seems deliberate, not a temporary issue where I was "snake-joking" about earlier. Well… no cute snakes for me.
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Details: cache-fra-etou8220097-FRA 1765473610 1384447547
Varnish cache server
But why? Why have anacondas - and sharks? - been immune to evolving? Why hasn’t a significant predator evolved - or invaded? - to feed on them? Why hasn’t 12 million years made the species fragile?
That being said if the question is "why have we not seen significant morphological changes" - there are a few ways to think about this.
First is that we would be blind to many types of morphological evolution. For example, if an isolated sub population of snakes or sharks started shrinking due to isolated environmental pressures, we would be unlikely to see this, but also if we fixate on the "largest anaconda", then we would filter out all "smaller snakes".
Second, the way we talk about "not evolving", especially for sharks is probably misleading. When we say sharks haven't changed, we mean to say that the shark body plan hasn't significantly changed. And this makes sense - they have a very efficient body plan for being a hunter in the see. We have "proof" of the suitable-ness since dolphins and other whales have converged onto a very similar body plan. Conversely, there are plenty of extinct sharks with body features that seem totally bizarre (https://www.fieldmuseum.org/blog/four-fossil-sharks-are-cool...).
Finally, especially in the context of "the largest" - the largest animals that can exist in a given environment is.... environmentally constrained, especially for land animals. The largest anaconda is likely near the largest sizes that the local environment to support, and so something larger appear is unlikely, without drastic environmental changes.
In any case, 12M years a long time for a species to survive, let alone survive “as is”. It makes me think of the creature in Alien and how it evolved into deadly perfection. But these creatures aren’t fictional.
p.s. Aren’t octopuses another species of little to no change? But they’re weird anyway so it’s not a surprise?
An additional complication is that some cephalopods have a relatively unique ability to change gene expression in response to environmental factors [0]. As a result, even if one were to see physiological change or change in ecological niche, it might not be as a result of speciation.
Hopefuly soon techniques of analyzing ancient DNA [1] will be more broadly used to understand the stories of long surviving species.
0. https://www.nsf.gov/news/masters-acclimation-octopuses-adjus...
:>
sorry ...