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And I thought having Brown Recluse spiders were bad, now I got these...

mushroomcloud.jpg
 
Seems like they'd be easy to avoid. Only the females sting, and they don't fly. Nothing good happens in the south. You should go to New Hampshire.
 
we call em cow ants round these parts...

your not kidding about the brown recluse this year, i see almost 1 a day this summer..


cow ants or mutilladaeasdfasdwerweawserdfasdsasa...whatever

have an uncanny ability to not be able to be stepped on and killed.. you'll soon learn this.
 
Yeah I found it out. Im 6'4" 400lbs and I was stomping the piss out of one and didnt faze it one bit. Time for raid 😉
 
Yeah I found it out. Im 6'4" 400lbs and I was stomping the piss out of one and didnt faze it one bit. Time for raid 😉

The exoskeleton of all velvet ants is unusually tough (to the point that some entomologists have reported difficulty piercing them with steel pins when attempting to mount them for display in cabinets). This characteristic allows them to successfully invade the nests of their prey and also helps them retain moisture. Like related families in the Vespoidea, males have wings but females uniformly are wingless. They exhibit extreme sexual dimorphism; the males and females are so different that it is almost impossible to associate the two sexes of a species unless they are captured while mating. In a few species the male is so much larger than the female that he carries her aloft while mating, which is also seen in the related family Tiphiidae.

Guess they got super armor.
 
The first time I saw one of those here in Florida I freaked out. It doesn't help that they are freaking orange and jump out at you. They are HUGE too. I fucking hate those things.
 
i like the white velvet ants (female), they look cool
http://bugguide.net/node/view/587941

ironclad beetles and a few ground/darkling beetles also have ridiculously hard exoskeletons.
the pins just don't go in even applying as much force as i possibly can, enough force to bend the pin 🙁
 
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Yeah I found it out. Im 6'4" 400lbs and I was stomping the piss out of one and didnt faze it one bit. Time for raid 😉

Take your soft soled shoes off and hit it with your naked heel on the concrete.

That should do it. :thumbsup:
 
See these all the time in the Pine Barrens of southern NJ. They're impressive insects, especially when they get up to an inch or longer. Not hard to avoid aggravating them, though. I think you'd be pretty unlikely to be stung by one.
 
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Only encountered one of these one time in my life here in Alabama. Thought it was some weird ant, and realized it was something else entirely when I attempted to step on it. It felt like a hard little rock under my shoe, and I could actually feel it moving beneath my shoe while making that distinct sound. Tough little bastards.
 
Those little cow killers are enough to inspire me to move to Africa. Who could possibly be afraid of a littlie itsy bitsie tetsie fly, who can blind you. Or maybe I should move to Southern Mexico, those killer bees are so friendly and cuddly. Or maybe Australia is the ticket, with their trap door spiders. Its why I plan to move to the North pole, please join me to be on the safe side.

But wait, at the rate global warming is proceeding, that may not be a viable long term plan. I hate swimming in ice water.
 
Worth getting a license to handle uranium as well. Grind it up into a fine dust, and mix it in with the raid.

On the other hand, maybe that's a bad idea, you'll end up with mutant spiders that are 20 times as powerful.
 
Another beauty of SoCal.......we have Black Widows, but as long as we spray the yard twice a year and avoid anything that is normally considered "their territory", you will be fine.
 
Speaking of spiders, I have this phobia of spider webs, but not spiders themselves, I was walking in my basement the other day, I tend to wave the broom around as I always get webs. This time I was going a little fast figuring I'm probably doing it for nothing. WHAM, almost in my face, a little black spider hanging off a web. If it was not for the spider I totally would have missed that web. The vertical ones are the worse, when you walk in it it goes from forehead to legs and covers the whole body. *shivers*.

I spray my house and basement with a residual killer, only thing is it still takes a few days for them to die so they have time to make webs. I think as a winter project I need to go around and fill all the holes and cracks in the foundation blocks. There are some tiny cracks and holes and that's probably how they get in. They go in from the brick weep holes and then walk down the cinder block. Also need to insulate the rim joists, same idea, they probably come out of there. They seem to always originate from the ceiling.

But at least I only have to worry about my silly non harmful phobia of spider webs, and not actually getting killed.
 
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