Fuck you, Spider-Man!

17 years ago

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33 Responses:

  1. prog says:
    17 years ago at 3:12 pm

    Spiders I don't mind. They are Friends of Man, as far as I'm concerned. (Modulo horrible poisonous bitey ones, I guess, but I've never lived near any.)

    These things, though... Of the photos on the page, the bike photos are funny and amazing but the ones further down, depicting huge wriggling boils of hungry larvae? I had physical difficulty looking at them, but was kept enthralled by the photographer's wondrously cruel series of closer-and-closer shots. Disgusting!
    • netik says:
      17 years ago at 4:02 pm

      The site only lists them as "caterpillars" (or so says InterTran). The northeast was attacked by Gypsy Moths many years ago with the same result. Coccoons everywhere and lots of devestated trees.
      • prog says:
        17 years ago at 4:18 pm

        I was living in Massachusetts at the time. I distinctly recall standing in a neighbor's wooded backyard and being able to hear, from all directions, the sound of countless tiny horrible mouths munching on leaves.
      • ahruman says:
        17 years ago at 10:44 am

        Swedish doesn't distinguish between "larva" and "caterpillar" in common use. Caterpillar is an overly specific translation.
    • spoonyfork says:
      17 years ago at 5:10 pm

      ... enthralled by the photographer's wondrously cruel series of closer-and-closer shots.
  2. zonereyrie says:
    17 years ago at 3:34 pm

    I remember these things growing up in upstate NY. But it was always a pocket of them in a tree or something, NEVER a plague like that. I never saw them enshroud an entire tree, let alone an entire area.

    I wonder how fast that happened that people allowed their bikes and such to be caught by it.
    • dr_memory says:
      17 years ago at 3:53 pm

      Talk about a bad town to be a passed-out drunkard.
    • cr0wgrrl says:
      17 years ago at 4:00 pm

      wow! me too! I remember when they invaded upstate... My sister and I were on goosh detail at our house... we'd check the apple trees daily, and destroy all we could find. *shudder*

      although those may not be quite the same ones that hit NY. the webs look more solid. Maybe tent caterpillars.
      • netik says:
        17 years ago at 4:03 pm

        I think you're right about the tent caterpillars. Look at this photo:
      • zonereyrie says:
        17 years ago at 8:58 pm

        They do look just like the Gypsy Moth caterpillars from NY, maybe a more aggressive breed.
        • rosefox says:
          17 years ago at 9:29 pm

          Gypsy moths were first introduced into the U.S. by some idiot who wanted to mate them with silkworms in hopes of developing a hardier silk-producing breed. Some caterpillars escaped from his house and bred the great plague of the Northeast.

          Looking at these photos, I'm glad he never succeeded in creating his hybrids.
          • xiphias says:
            17 years ago at 5:20 am

            Amusingly, the research was done largely in Medford, Malden, and Melrose, the town I live in and two towns adjacent. When we were considering buying our house, we did some research on its history, and, looking at historical maps of the place, we discovered that, seventy or eighty years ago, the building diagonally behind our house was labeled the "Gypsy Moth Research Center". And an older neighbor mentioned that, as a small child, they'd called that bulding the "Bug House."
    • ellyjonez says:
      17 years ago at 4:48 pm

      yes, i used to live in a tent outside at a retreat center in upstate new york. one night i fell asleep drunkenly with the flap open and woke up with my dreadlocks full of caterpillars. and everything else. it was kind of awesome. i felt like a true forest creature.
  3. ellyjonez says:
    17 years ago at 4:48 pm

    i thought this was some kind of urban street art about forgotten bicycles, at first.
    • httf says:
      17 years ago at 11:11 pm

      Oh good. I'm not alone. My first reaction was plotting to do urban street art with them. I think the effect is beautiful, though I'm not quite to the point of wanting them in my dreadlocks.
  4. kimberley66 says:
    17 years ago at 5:15 pm

    And this clearly illustrates why I like reptiles not insects!!
  5. phreddiva says:
    17 years ago at 5:49 pm

    I am itchy just looking at that.
  6. lilamp says:
    17 years ago at 6:20 pm

    jesus fuck that's a lot of caterpillars.
  7. matrushkaka says:
    17 years ago at 6:26 pm

    Sweet buttery Jesus. Just tell me where the fuck they are and I will be right over with my flame thrower to annihilate them all.
    • artlung says:
      17 years ago at 7:07 pm

      Hudson: [the Marines are inside the Alien's Atmosphere Processor Hive, Hudson is reading a motion detector] We've got multiple signals... uh, front and behind... reading's off the chart!
      Vasquez: There's nothing here. You're just reading us, there's nothing!
      Hudson: [Motion detector shows such a large group of points moving towards them that it appears like just a massive blur on the monitor] Look there's something moving in here and it ain't us! Reading's off the charts man! They're all around us man! What the hell?
      Dietrich: [looking through an infra-red scope, walks right past an Alien that is molded into the Hive's wall without even noticing it] Maybe they don't show up on infra red at all -
      [the Alien pounces on her and drags her up to the ceiling]

      ...

      Burke: Look, this is an emotional moment for all of us, okay? I know that. But let's not... Let's not make snap judgments, please. This is clearly an important species we're dealing with and I don't think that you or I, or anybody, has the right to arbitrarily exterminate them!
      Ripley: Wrong!
    • fulguritus says:
      17 years ago at 9:20 pm

      I love flame throwers, and this would be a perfectly good excuse to pull one out. No cop in the vicinity would stop you. It would be deathly mayhem.
  8. valacosa says:
    17 years ago at 7:40 pm

    I've seen this kind of infestation before (and took photos too, though mine are much less impressive). For some reason, it reminds me of the Zerg.

    Beware the larvae...
  9. editer says:
    17 years ago at 9:05 pm

  10. phs says:
    17 years ago at 6:26 am

    Today:Tomorrow:
  11. kroker says:
    17 years ago at 3:47 pm

    I used to live there. glad i've moved out.
  12. luserspaz says:
    17 years ago at 6:47 am

    Just for archival purposes, he's posted an explanation page:
    http://user.it.uu.se/~svens/larverna/about.html
    "The animal is a moth called Bird-cherry Ermine (latin: Yponomeuta evonymella; Swedish: häggspinnmal, where "hägg" is Swedish for bird cherry, "spinn" is to spin and "mal" is moth, so the name means something like "moth that spins [a web] on bird cherries"). I took the photos a summer day in 2005 in Flogsta/Hamberg, a discrict in Uppsala, which is a city about 60 km north of Stockholm, Sweden."

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