That post about the life of a crab makes me think again about how we humans are SO fascinated by monsters, demons, killer robots, supervillains, dinosaurs, big cats, basically the whole idea of having deadly foes more fantastic and impressive than an asshole with a gun or a terminal illness, to the point that some people even kinda wish they lived in Hyrule or the Star Wars galaxy or the DCU where life would be vastly deadlier but at least more exotic and thrilling for it. Our pop culture has invented probably billions of fictional creatures that can kill a person. We are obsessed with this concept. We think we have a mundane position in our natural order because the terror birds are gone and dragons were never real.
But if you’re at the scale of MOST life on Earth, all the tiny little insects and crustaceans and worms and molluscs, there could never be a Monster Manual fat enough to document everything that can slaughter you in a creative new way. If you’re a small enough arthropod in my state alone you might face birds, lizards, salamanders, frogs, rodents, shrews, moles, fish, tiger beetles, rove beetles, earwigs, centipedes, spiders, scorpions, ant swarms, wasps, mantises, mantidflies, scorpionflies, dragonflies, robber flies, owlflies, parasitoid flies, predatory maggots, omnivorous katydids, ambush bugs, assassin bugs, carnivorous stink bugs, toad bugs, water striders, water boatmen, pitcher plants, sundews, fluid-sucking mites, pathogenic fungi, nematode worms that will tunnel through your exoskeleton and puke decomposing bacteria into your guts, several dozen more that I’m missing, and most notably, an ape so huge you can’t even comprehend its entirety but it might still decide to kill you either because it thinks you’re ugly or it decides you’re a threat to its personal garden of food.
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