Whats the BIGGEST BUG you ever encountered!?!

[SideshowScott]

Bugs..Most of us hate them with a passoin..They make grown men scream like litte girls, They make your skin crawl, they will make you call your ex-boyfrind up at 4 am to drive 20 miles to come kill..( i got that call from my ex to kill a a waterbug ) Sure we all get that big ass waterbug that appears from nowhere that makes that sickning crunch sound when you kill it but once in a while you will encounter a frikkin MONSTER that defies reason and scares the living crap out of you..
One time when i was a wee scottie we were playing tag at my uncles in the backyard with the local kids at night..I ran into a big spiderweb that was disorinting and scary at the same time..I flayed about trying to get the web off i could HEAR the other kids screaming in pure horror..My eyes could not see anything beacuse it was blocked by the body of the largest garden spider that anyone had ever seen..This thing had WEIGHT i could feel it crawling on my face like the alien face hugger..I then screamed very loud to where the other kids screamed even louder and i pushed it off my face and ran so fast that i doubt my feet touched the gorund..I had nightmares about it all the way to my 20's
Another time i was camping in the summer and climbed a tree just to prove this 30ish year old could still do it..I came over a branch to see the eyes stareing at me of the biggest praying mantis id ever seen..This thing could kill mice and im sure it did..Scared me so much i nearly fell out of the tree..
Another time not a big bug story but me and some pals were walking to the store to get beer..it was in the country so it was a hump to get there..A big ass flying bug..( I forget the name but its the ones that shed and leave its sedding on trees)hit my freind so hard in the side of the face that it knocked him over and we had to take him to the hospital to put 3 stiches in a gash the bug left..
Well i know you guys have some gooduns!

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

1. You ain't seen nuthin til you've seen a flyin hawaiian cockroach!

They are a good four to six inches long and if you swat them they will fly after you and attack. They are HUGE. Unfortunately I only have ONE phobia in life...guess what it is? :shrug:

[sandnsea]

2. In Mississippi too OH MY GOD

I don't know exactly what they are, but flying cockroach is about right and they are about 4 inches and they will absolutely fly at you. And then they have some that swim and oh my god Mississippi has the nastiest bugs yuk yuk yuk yuk blech blech blech

I didn't like it there, can ya tell???

[SideshowScott]

3. YIKES Shocks!

Ive heard stories about those flying cockroachs in Hawaii and in Fla with great fear and hatred...I could not imagine doing battle with one of those things

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

8. Me either dammit! I have only ONE phobia in life!

But I was on a surf trip to Kauai and staying in a friend's tree house back in the early 90's. Besides checking your shoes for scorpions regularly (which didn't bug me even though they are poisonous) you literally had to do a double take of everything you grabbed to make sure one of the buggers wasn't on it. They seem to blend right in with everything there.

Needless to say, having a phobia and such, I got little sleep the week I was there.

[sam sarrha]

4. in '71 i was living in a stick hut with a thatched rood on a Maya mound in

the jungles of Belize, Central America. the moon light would shine thru the cracks in the stick walls on the dirt floor in blue/black stripes, i thought i saw a rat in the moon light and shot it, i saw it roll over and kick a few times.. in the morning i found out that i had shot a cockroach 8 inches long, right behind the head.. in those days we had to sleep with a variety of weapons, and shoot them several times every nite to keep the bandits worrying ..shotgun, ruger, little french automatic which helped scare away the vampire bats for 3 or 4 nites. all the hardware kept the vampire bats from crawling under the mosquito net...

[SideshowScott]

6. Thats what i call hard living!

Ok now im sorry i created this tread its giving me the heebie-jeebies :)

[Feanorcurufinwe]

7. Maybe this was not the right thread for me to read just before bed lol

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

9. Actually the largest one I ever saw was in a case and dead

but it is the largest cockroach in the world..a type of Madagascar cockroach ( you see my dad taught me fear of anything was ignorance so I actually PUT myself around the friggin things for a while trying to get over the phobia ...learned as much as I could about them DID NOT WORK!!!) Anyway it's not the HISSING cockroach but another variety...can't recall the name though..it HUGE ...very much like the RAT you referenced.


It was in the entymology lab at USC - which had a couple thousand LIVE specimens in the room as well ( needless to say I itched and scratched all the way home on THAT drive)

[radwriter0555]

26. (Scratching BELIZE off the list of places to go) HOLY

crap!

[MoonGod]

5. Do tarantulas count?

This photo was taken on my front porch when I lived in El Paso. This critter was hanging out above our front door when we came home one night. Was a biggun', too!

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

10. I like tarantulas though

they make pretty sweet pets.

[MoonGod]

13. Never had one as a pet...

... but I enjoyed watching this one for the brief time it was on our porch.

[short bus president]

29. my grandmother used to have pet tarantulas

I remember playing with them as a kid. Felt just too cool to have those 8 hairly little legs crawl around on ya, and IMO the fuzziness factor made them kinda cute (in much the same way that bats are kinda cute).

Yet I fear smaller spiders. :shrug:

[Gman]

21. My son's baseball game was once stopped because of tarantulas

on the field. They were everywhere on the field, dozens of them. They are, of course, harmless. So the kids scooped them up, or hurried them off the field and the game resumed after about 15 minutes.

[caribmon]

11. How 'bout one of these in your bed at night?

[rock]

19. Gosh, they're all so cute!

[phaseolus]

12. one of the benefits of living in a place with cold winters

...is our bugs don't get very big. Worst I've had to deal with was on a business trip to Texas -- they get plagues of giant crickets in biblical proportions. Some of them fly, & they're strangely reminiscent of the evil gremlins from the "Gremlins" movie.

Then they all start dying at the same time, and they rot and stink. Someone told me they sometimes render buildings uninhabitable when several cubic yards-full of them crawl into that space underneath elevators and stink so bad you can't go in the building...

[librechik]

14. A rhinoceros beetle in Ecuador in 75 (there's one in a post below)

About 8 inches long counting the horn. They Fly! One night we were sitting out on the porch and something fell onto the floor next to me. I thought somebody had thrown a dried rose branch up to us in the dark, but it was a rhino beetle that had been flying up against the street light. When I figured out what it was I didn't want it crawling around in my room (we were sleeping in bags on the floor)
so I put a heavy ceramic chamber pot over it. In the morning I found the chamber pot flipped over and the bug gone!

[izzie]

15. I lived in Saudi and saw something that made my hair stand on end.

I swear it was bird size and it was on the side of a building. The India man who worked their told me what it was but I do not recall but I hope we never get bugs that big in Maine. The place was full of bats but I am sure they could not have eaten this thing as it had to be as big as the bat. I swear I have never seen a bug that big before. I also let 16 lady bugs stay on my sky lite all winter so I am not for killing every bug in sight. I figured they did good as they were always on my house plants then on the window.

[Kamika]

16. small things like the brain sucker in starship troopers

i saw tons of these stuck on a wall, they werent that big but they looked exactly like that one.. and this happened when i was really young so imagine what my phobia is now

[THUNDER HANDS]

17. when I was a kid

A local pool I used to go to had these two GIANT praying mantis' that used to (literally) guard the front door to the pool.

THey sat in the bushes next to the entrance and they were brown. I swear, these things had to have been a foot tall. I think they snatched up small children who wandered away from their parents.

:evilgrin:

[arwalden]

18. A Dobson Fly

While camping in PA, this HUGE-ASS critter landed on my folding flourescent lantern.

[LuLu550]

20. It seems a bit tame, but

I was doing laundry once and saw what I thought was a large (about three inches across) plastic spider on the floor near the washer. Thinking it was a toy that fell from my son''s pocket, I bent down to pick it up. You guessed it, it ran off, I screamed on the top of my lungs and started shaking!
Needless to say, I never believe big spiders in my basement are plastic anymore.
By the way, thanks for all the creepy crawly pictures. I think I'll take a shower now.
LuLu

[midnight armadillo]

22. A praying mantis

About 6 inches tall. Absolutely beautiful - what a predator! I do have a thing about beetles though - can't stand 'em, cockroaches in particular. Other bugs don't bother, not even spiders. I did see an 8 inch long, 1.5 inch thick fluorescent yellow with black stripes caterpillar in the Caribbean once.

[Gato Moteado]

23. the bug that hit your friend in the face....

...sounds like a cicada.

i'm a naturalist and wildlife freak so i've seen tons of big bugs. in central america i had a wolf spider the size of a tarantula in my shower once. i've seen centipedes at least a foot long. tarantulas, scorpion, walking sticks, mantids (though i don't think praying mantises get 1 foot tall as some of the claims in this thread suggest). i've seen some big beetles too.

the flying roaches in the southern U.S. that people are talking about are palmetto bugs. while they are creepy, they're not nearly as bad as the european cockroaches that infest so many urban buildings.

[THUNDER HANDS]

27. about that praying mantis

I was about seven when I saw it. It might have been less than a foot, but I swear it wasn't by much.

These weren't those little green mantis' you see on nature shows or in your tomato garden. These were two ENORMOUS insects that could take down a small dog.

Or so I recollect.

:)

[Droopy]

24. Down on the Ohio river

on an island I saw the biggest bugs I've ever seen. They were moths the size of a bat. I never saw them fly though. They were just hanging out on the side of a tree.

[GOPisEvil]

25. This one!

2000lbs. at least!!! But friendly! :D

[short bus president]

32. Friendly?

He's a veritable love bug!

Early afternoon corn from GOPisEvil... ah, the Lounge.

;-)

[bikebloke]

28. Camping in Aussie

I woke one night in my tent sensing something over my head. The tent's ceiling was made of fine mesh. So I scrabbled in one of my panniers for the torch, grabbed it and clicked it on. Crikey! There was a huge spider as big as my hand. I'm sure it was wearing Doc Martins. So, pump in hand (I was cycle trekking at the time) we fought it out for a good five minutes before I finally discouraged it to sit over some other campers face in another tent.

[TrogL]

30. The Intel chipset

A 640K barrier - still!?!?!. You've got to be kidding.

[TrogL]

33. Oh, you mean insects

Back in the early days of PC computing, you often had to construct your own computers from scratch. I built a monstrosity out of parts from a Honeywell mainframe (for the chassis, keyboard and inputs and outputs) and breadboarded the rest. It ran once, then the power supply shorted out and fried everything.

Around about that time a friend phoned up bitching and complaining because his mother had thrown out hundred of dollars worth of chips because she thought they were toy spiders.

[LeftPeopleFinishFirst]

31. A spider that was literally 5 inches in diameter

I was at my friends house and we had her brother kill it. He was even creeped out and we never went back down to the basement, lol.

Although I'm sure that Skinner, Elad, and earl's answer would be the biggest bug they've even encountered is DU2! :hi: