Let’s just call it quits, people.

Over the last couple of weeks, Mother Nature has decided to remind all of us who’s really in charge.

Here’s the rundown of recently terrifying yet gentle reminders from her:

Deadly Spiders vs Homeowners:

After purchasing a house from the previous owners who failed to disclose that it was actually a destination spot for the deadly brown recluse spider, the latest owners began discovering spiders everywhere until they were eventually bursting out of the walls.

A conservative estimate of 6,000 spiders were said to be lurking in the house.

[ABC News]

Ants vs Tire-Changing Human:

Then there’s THIS incident where some human needed to change a tire on the side of the road and got in the way of a bunch of ants’ business.

[CBS News]

And finally…

Bees vs Landscapers:

In Arizona several landscapers got too close to a 100 pound hive of Africanized Bees that had taken up residence in the comfy attic of a home the landscapers were working around.

[ABC News]

So…what have we learned this week?

To be terrified of basically everything around us.

Seagulls are about the very last animal you’d think of when someone ask you to name something that might kill a full-size whale.

But that would just mean that weren’t keeping up on the events taking place out in the waters off the coast of Argentina.

Because trash isn’t covered or really being recycled on nearby land, the gull population has exploded in recent years. No one’s really sure when it started but with dead whales turning up on shore, researchers began noticing something a little unsettling…peck marks.

Seagulls are opportunists like vultures when it comes to an easy meal. At some point a gull realized that whales are pretty easy targets when they come up for air. Now that behavior has become the norm for thousands of these birds. During the calving season when babies whales are born the problem is exacerbated because baby whales need to stay up longer to feed off their mothers. Routines are changing because of the gulls and their relentless attacks…the calves feeding time is shortened. Calves bodies are washing up on shore suffering obvious effects of malnutrition.

Local government is allowing a cull of the birds within the month and targeting the birds who’ve developed this behavior. It’s been done before with no real change in the birds’ behavior.

Let’s all hope this gets sorted out…because once, and we’re just tossing this out there because we like to get hypothetical this way, we run out of whales…

We’ll probably be next.
[Geekosystem]

It wasn’t too long ago that North America’s Hellmouth of a state was calling for people to go out into the wild and bag/kill as many giant pythons as they possibly could.
Now that that’s yesterday’s Nature versus Humankind battle is over, everyone’s favorite birthing place of weird EVERYTHING is taking us back to the good old days of that era of 1970s horror films when piranha, worms, snakes, rats, bears and even tadpoles decided they were tired of sharing the planet with us.

Just what the hell is this new scourge that’s coming to wreak havoc upon us now?

Brace yourselves, people…

Snails.

SNAILS!

And they’re exactly the kind of snails some of you are imagining right now…
Giant African Snails that can grow to 8 inches long, devour 500 different species of plants and (you’re going to slap your face like Maculay Culkin in Home Alone right about now) they are tearing through stucco and peoples’ homes! Not only that but the snails’ shells are big enough to puncture car tires because they’re Frogger-like skills are nonexistent!

Good luck, Florida.

[Huffington Post]

Russia is a unique place. They drive a little differently there, meteors land there and now they’ve decided to tackle robotics…in the form a creepy walking robot disguised as a cute (but threateningly non-cute and blankly-staring) ostrich-walker.

Like the love-child of an AT-ST from the Star Wars universe and the little robots from the classic sci-fi film Silent Running, this attempt at making roaming ‘bots cute just ends up making it all that much creepier.

Why an ostrich? Only the group of four Russians calling themselves the Konstantin Ivanov could answer that question.

Using parts you might find at home and your local Radio Shack, the team set out to contstruct a walking robot on an extremely limited budget as a way of showing what they might be capable of if someone actually opened their wallet for Team Ivanov.

Total cost of Ostrich Mech? $1,500…

Expressions of horror from anyone who sees this thing marching toward them on the street?

Priceless.

[Konstantin Ivanov YouTube]

It was totally bound to happen.

People have been enjoying the sweet nectar of pork we all afftectionately refer to as bacon on a overly indulgent basis for a long, long time.

Forget the dead rising up to walk amongst us and gnaw on our fleshy parts.

This story might be the first sign that something much more sinister is taking place on farms around the country…

A pig uprising.

On a small farm in Oregon, police have reportedly found the false teeth and a few remains of farmer 69 year-old Terry Vance Garner in the pen where he keeps his pigs.

According to Garner’s old brother, Michael, one of the pigs had apparently bitten Terry last year when he accidentally stepped on a piglet. While no one’s sure what exactly took place the horrific and creepy fact is that a bunch of pigs ate a farmer and had no problem with the taste of man-meat.

District Attorney Paul Frasier told local papers and news media:

“For all we know, it was a horrific accident, but it’s so doggone weird that we have to look at all possibilities.”

[BBC UK]

Please watch video of this beast before we post the new episode of Weird Things on Wednesday.

I’ve never been attacked by an alligator while fishing in the traquil marsh lands of central Florida, but if I was, it’s probably sound something like this.

Thomas Swiader Jr. found himself on the business end of an angry gator who leapt from the water, jostling the fisherman in his kayak. What follows is a string of fairly hilarious obscenities. THE VIDEO BELOW CONTAINS THESE OBSCENITIES, PLEASE BE AWARE.

[Fox News]

Santino is sick of your gawking and he’s determined to gain sweet revenge by tagging your forehead with a rock.

Santino is a chimp at Sweden’s Furuvik Zoo. He’d gained a reputation for throwing projectiles at particularly annoying visitors so one researcher decided to track his pattern. He discovered a evolving strategy that showed signs of forethought and improvisation.

Here is one of his plots…

“After a visitor group had left the compound area, Santino went inside the enclosure and brought a good-sized heap of hay that he placed near the visitor’s section, and immediately after that he put stones under it,” Osvath said.

“He also appeared to have placed projectiles behind, just before he went in after the hay. After this, he sat down beside the hay and waited. When the visitors came back, he waited until they were close by and, without any preceding display, he threw stones at the crowd.”

How much longer until he starts getting mail order packages from ACME?

[Fox News]

I think he might have some sort of vitamin deficiency. Second fox related post of the month for those keeping track.

[Animal Oddities]

“Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.”

What a malarky sentence. It’s never safe. Ever. Stop thinking that people. There will always be something in there to kill you.

Take this brand new sea snake discovered off the coast of Australia. It’s venomous and coated in spikes, just in case that first part wasn’t enough.

Though some other sea snakes have spiky scales on their bellies, “no other [known] sea snake has this curious feature,” study leader Kanishka Ukuwela, an ecologist at the University of Adelaide, said by email.

Normally snakes have smooth scales, but each of the newly named Hydrophis donaldi’s scales has a spiny projection, he said.

Scientists cruising shallow seagrass beds in the Gulf of Carpentaria (map) recently captured nine of the rough-scaled reptiles.

Seriously, the ocean is a soup of terror. I will never feel at ease until James Cameron personally murders all of these horrifying little goblins and any others we haven’t accidentally run across.

From here on out, I live my life by the SALTY LANGUAGE PLEASE DON’T CLICK UNLESS YOU WANT TO HEAR CURSE WORDS code of Chris Cooper in Adaptation.

[National Geographic]

After a man left a grocery store, a fox stalked him and would not leave the man alone until he gave the fox some of his food. This was a fully grown man, by the way, weighing in at over 200 lbs.

“Despite making attempts to escape, the fox persisted and carried out a sustained attack on the food he had just bought from Tesco.

Eventually, Mr Baker claims, he resorted to offering the animal his loaf of garlic bread and the fox scampered off.”

Everybody knows foxes love garlic bread. However, wildlife experts do not think you should give in and give food to foxes, but should try and frighten them away. Perhaps with a weapon of some kind?

“The best thing to use is a water pistol.”

Ah. OK.

[The Telegraph]

Kids do the darndest things.

It can be a full time job trying to keep foreign, sometimes disgusting objects out of their mouths. But what if you could use the disturbing habit to your benefit? What if your infant could be used to safe guard the rest of family.

Who needs a dog when you can count on your child to murder snakes and eat their heads?

Here is the testimony from Palestinian mother Ghadeer Aylan…

“I was tending to a bottle of milk for my child Adhmad in the kitchen. I found in his hand the body of a small snake, its head in his mouth. I didn’t believe my eyes, and nearly died from shock and horror and almost fainted. I screamed at him, but he didn’t understand. Neighbors came over and carried on removing the body from my son’s mouth.”

Young Admad was rushed to a hospital and was found to be totally healthy. And the most hardcore baby on Earth.

Huge thank you to Weird Things reader Josh Souliere for finding and translating this story.

[Daral Hayat]

It attacks cats and leaves thick scratches in tree trunks, but state officials aren’t sure what is roaming through the Fort Lauderdale suburb of Davie. Residents swear it’s a Black Panther, others are saying it’s more likely a coyote. Either way, it’s scaring the beejeezus out of locals.

Fearing another sighting, or possible attack soon, neighbors are taking precautions, including cutting down on playtime for some kids living near the alleged panther sighting.

“Ever since they heard there’s a panther, we can’t go outside by ourselves,” said Matthew Okun.

An animal trapper is currently on the case, tracking the beast.

[NBC Miami]

In what would go down as the earliest Comic-Con publicity stunt in support of 2012’s new film Amazing Spider-man, a venomous lizard was captured in San Diego.

The 2-foot-long lizard, native to the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico, is being kept at a county animal shelter in Carlsbad until officials with the state Department of Fish and Game can devise a relocation plan.

“It’s very dangerous and illegal to possess without a permit,” said Lt. Dan DeSousa of the animal services department.

Although we cannot prove this an organic way to get Southern California nerds terrified of lizards, just like Peter Parker will be on July 3rd in 3D and IMAX, we do hope that Rhys Ifans finds it funny.

[LA Times]

It’s under the water. Just below the gentle, lapping surface near Olympic Park in East London. It lurks.

What it is, we don’t yet know. Aside from the apparent taste for fat Canadian Geese, not much can be confirmed as no one has yet to put an eyeball on it.

Witnesses alerted environment bosses after seeing a 16lb Canada goose dragged under the surface, with fears there could now be a pike, alligator or even a large python stalking the waters near the Olympic site.

The number of swans on the river and waterways near the newly-built £9bn Olympic Park is also dropping.

No matter what manner of beastie is currently snacking in the waters, we will suspect it’s still less terrifying than the official Olympic mascots.

[Daily Mail]

A man convicted of his wife’s murder will get a new trial for two reasons.

1) It has come to light that the, since fired, State Bureau of Investigation agent in charge of his investigation mishandled evidence in several of his cases.

2) A new theory, backed by several experts, that a rogue owl got into the house and triggered the wife’s fatal fall down the stairs.

A successful author, Michael Peterson was first convicted of his wife’s murder in 2003. The new owl theory hinges on a feather found at the scene of the crime and injuries to the head of the victim which specialists from the Smithsonian Institute say are consistent with what would occur if an owl was tangled in her hair.

The case, sans owl theory, was dramatized in the 2007 Lifetime Original Movie “The Staircase Murders” starring Treat Williams.

[MSNBC]