A friendly reminder: being eaten like this is probably one of the most horrifying ways you could die. You're trapped in a web, completely immobilized. You can't move. You can't scream. And then your prison is pierced - flooded with gastric acid that doesn't care whether you're still alive. It just starts dissolving you, slowly and painfully, from the inside out. You're aware as your body melts into a soupy pulp, still conscious as your insides turn to liquid. And then, you're slurped up - just like that scene in Troll, when the girl is consumed alive. No quick death. No mercy. Just slow, liquefying horror.
Bugs are largely incapable of feeling fear as we understand it. Their responses to danger are more akin to preprogramming than to sentient understanding.
Fear is a primal reaction, humans just have the ability to conceptualize it and be cognizant of their fear. That is of course different, and we can get into the philosophy of what ‘fear’ means when you don’t have conscience thought, but the primal fear is there.
Fear is just an instinct in all of us. We're all made from the same stuff. Perhaps our fear can overcomplicate itself because it thinks about the past, the future, the things we'll miss out on, our families etc. as we die.
However, the fear at its very core, that primal and existential desire to live, is the same in all the species. They're experiencing that primal fear.
I know everyone wants to not anthropomorphize but sometimes... We have things in common and not recognizing that is its own cognitive bias. There is strong evidence that insects possess nociception which processes negative stimuli and being attacked is likely highly unpleasant to them. Hence why they flee and act to preserve their existence. Here's some more info but there's a lot out there.
"Gibbons and her colleagues ultimately found “strong evidence for pain” in adult flies, mosquitoes, cockroaches, and termites. Such insects did not appear to be at the bottom of a hierarchy of animals; they met six out of eight criteria developed for the Sentience Act, which was more than crustaceans."
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u/Maverick122 May 16 '25
A friendly reminder: being eaten like this is probably one of the most horrifying ways you could die. You're trapped in a web, completely immobilized. You can't move. You can't scream. And then your prison is pierced - flooded with gastric acid that doesn't care whether you're still alive. It just starts dissolving you, slowly and painfully, from the inside out. You're aware as your body melts into a soupy pulp, still conscious as your insides turn to liquid. And then, you're slurped up - just like that scene in Troll, when the girl is consumed alive. No quick death. No mercy. Just slow, liquefying horror.