Body-Burrowing Hagfish and Spider-Tailed Vipers: 5 Natural Nightmares

Creature feature movies come up with some bizarre beasts, but the real world has some equally disturbing occupants. Check out...

• The Sneaky Spider-Tailed Snake
• The Unsporting Pelican Spider
• The Slow-Moving, Sharp-Shooting Velvet Worm
• The Horrifying, Body-Burrowing Hagfish
• The Insidious Zombie Fly

The Sneaky Spider-Tailed Snake

Some people have a phobia of spiders, others of snakes... and kindly old Mother Nature has produced a creature that combines both in a single nightmare-inducing package!

The spider-tailed horned viper is a snake with a built in organic lure. The tip of its tail branches out into a pinkish mass with scales drooping off either side - the end result looks a lot like a big and juicy bug, spider or other creepy-crawly, which birds find incredibly hard to resist.

The snake itself has a rough, rocky-sand colored body, so most creatures only see the lure moving around in the rocks... but birds that fly down to snap up the meal find themselves the victim of the sneaky snake instead!

The Unsporting Pelican Spider

Hunting venomous prey has drawbacks - the biggest of which is the chance of a retaliatory poisonous bite. Enter the pelican spiders, ancient arachnids that feed primarily on spiders... and have a deeply unfair advantage in a battle of the bites.

These spiders take their name from their strange looks. They each have an elongated false neck and over-long mouthparts - the end result looking like the neck and beak of a pelican when viewed from the side.

Rather than building a web, pelican spiders hunt by looking for the telltale signs of other arachnids - cast off bits of silk or draglines used to build webs. They then sneak up on their unsuspecting prey and impale them on their long, protruding, fang-tipped jaws, holding them safely away while the venom does its work!

Pelican spiders are classed as living fossils - which is a testament to how effective their hunting technique is!

The Slow-Moving, Sharp-Shooting Velvet Worm

Despite their name, these weird creatures are not worms - neither are they the caterpillars that they resemble. With their soft body and slow movement, they seem pretty harmless... which (if you were a small arthropod) would be a fatal mistake.

The velvet worm is an ambush predator, and it brings a (glue) gun to a knife fight. Upon encountering potential prey, this invertebrate quickly aims a set of tubes on its head towards the target and sprays them with an organic, fast-setting glue.

The hapless prey soon finds itself trapped, with the velvet worm inching towards them. Upon reaching the doomed creature, the worm uses its sickle jaws and digestive enzymes to open the prey up and dissolve their internal organs, slurping up the resulting soup. They may also consume the "glue" while they wait for prey to render down, allowing them to reuse the protein expended in their attack!

The Horrifying, Body-Burrowing Hagfish

If you ever needed a reason to stay out of the ocean, the hagfish has you covered... possibly in slime.

They're primitive jawless fish with a cartilage skeleton and tough (but loose) skin. They've actually been described as a swimming sausage, but (thanks to their flexible and "squishy" body structure) most fish struggle to seriously hurt them with a bite.

That's where the next trick of the hagfish comes into play. They can produce copious amounts of sticky, choking slime - and any predatory fish that attacks them will find itself asphyxiating as its gills become clogged. You might be wondering how the hagfish avoids sliming itself to death - well, the simple answer is that it can tie its squishy body into a sliding knot and wipe itself clean.

Perhaps the most horrifying thing about hagfish is the way they eat. They are primarily scavengers that burrow inside their meals, using rasping plates in its mouth to pinch off morsels of food. They can also use the knot trick mentioned above to pull chunks of flesh from a body, or even absorb nutrients directly through their skin. Here's the really grim part - they don't always wait for their meals to die before getting stuck in, so any sick or injured fish better head for the hills if a hagfish is nearby!

The Insidious Zombie Fly

In recent years, scientists have become aware of an insidious threat attacking bees (among other insects) and devouring them from within - the zombie fly.

The name sounds like a bad sci-fi horror film, but DNA traces of this species of North American phorid fly have been detected in bulk bee screenings as far away as Belgium and Korea. Researchers also believe the insect could colonize the majority of the globe without issue - and that it would have a serious effect in the world's population of bees.

So what does the zombie fly do? It oviposits (lays eggs) into the thorax of adult bees... and the larva feast on the muscles (and possibly the nervous system) of their unfortunate hosts.

Infested bees appear increasingly disorientated and eventually leave the hive at night - it's unknown if this is due to the parasite manipulating their behavior, a last ditch attempt by the bee to protect the hive or if the other bees forcibly eject their doomed comrade.

One embarked on this final flight (here's the zombie bit) the bees seek out lights, flying erratically, around them before dropping to the ground and dying. The fly larvae then burst out of the bee to continue the horrific cycle!

Thanks for reading - you might also like...

• Blood, Bees and Bone: These 5 Animals Have Surprising Diets
• 7 Out-of-This-World Animals So Strange They Seem Alien
• Big Eater? These 8 Animals Hunt Prey Larger Than They Are!

Sources and Further Reading:

• It looks like a spider and moves like a spider, but this is no spider – it’s an evolutionary nightmare. Watch the deadly killer in action.
• These newly discovered pelican spiders will make you want to visit Madagascar
• Current Biology: Velvet Worms
• Hagfishes: how much slime can a slime eel make?
• Global invasion risk of Apocephalus borealis, a honey bee parasitoid