Mortein, Baygon or hit 'em with the ole Peabeau? A thong perhaps? (a tried and tested cockroach stopper)
Ironically, guess what's the one of the few things that will thrive on a diet of nothing but cockroaches.
Funny world.
Some of those bull ants can jump by flicking their abdomen - sounded like tiny popcorns going off when we put them in icecream containers as kids. Not good things to play around with though. Apart from the pain, I read that by getting a series of bites you might develop a deadly hyper-allergic reaction over time.
They're nasty little blighters alrighty. No match for a well placed tupp'ny bunger though, albeit that they usually managed to get their revenge. No matter how many times we nuked a bullant nest, it was only ever just afterwards that we remembered how blowing a few hundred of them into the the air was always going to result in them raining back down a few seconds later, with their collective mood little improved by the experience.
That, coupled with the aforementioned jumping ability, rendered the whole exercise about as sensible as playing Ruissian Roulette with a machine gun, but it didn't dissuade us one little bit. It's good being indestructable, as only kids are.
We never really believed the story about devoloping a cumulative allergy to the things, assuming it was just one of those stories that somebody's big brother had made up. Nobody I know has ever suffered more than just the pain, even from multiple bites, however, at this stage of my life I find it easier to just believe it than put it to the test.
The main point of contention between us was whether the black ones or the red ones hurt the most, and without recalling the consensus of the time, I'm sure the decision was usually made on the basis of which one had most recently bitten you.
On the subject of creepy-crawlies, those hairy caterpillars are bad news. I had a trip to the hospital as a youngster when my whole face and neck swelled up after messing around with one of them.
Now those are a definite mongrel of a thing. I never had a trip to the hossie because of them, but I can well imagine it happening. Getting a bindi or a splinter is one thing, but getting SIX BILLION at once is just no joke at all.
The 'hairy grubs' themselves never caused me much trouble, partly because they were fairly visible, and partly because they were usually pretty high up in the trees, nomming on the leaves, but the damned cocoons were another story altogether. You could hardly see them, even when you were looking, and it was just too easy to grab a handful of one when climbing over a fence or whatevever. I'm sure I still have a few thousand of the horrid things embedded in my skin.
I'll do a proper write-up of
Chelepteryx collesi in a future post.
Just so you can have a nightmare about it, and so the viewers know what we're on about, here's a picture of the varmint. This one is about 10 cm (4") long:
Chelepteryx Collesi (White Stemmed Gum Moth) Caterpillar
ETA: I see the little exploding frog there now.
Bufo marinus kaboomicus
Well, that's a relief. I could see a repeat of the cane toad importation. "Oh, it seemed like a good idea to encourage the carnivorous ants at the time, sorry to all of the people whose kids have been taken away and eaten."
Hmm, now that I think about it, children being carried off by marauding ants isn't a
totally bad idea.
