It's August, and that means one thing in warmer climates: people spend more time in nature, and nature, in turn, tries to bite them. August is mosquito season, it's snakebite season—hell, even Shark Week is in summer. But lots of the thing we know about summer's flesh-nibbling threats are dead wrong, and that's why we have Ken Jennings from Jeopardy! lurking here in the underbrush to tell us, at long last, the real truth about summer's bitey pests.
The Debunker: Do South American Fish Want to Swim Up Your Urethra and Bite You?
If there's one thing the Internet loves, it's a weird animal story—the grosser the better. This is just an escalation of a fascination that spans human history, from Greek philosophers credulously noting hard-to-believe stories of exotic monsters in Asia and Africa to Victorian amateur naturalists heading to the Amazon with butterfly nets. Certainly nature is full of marvels and mysteries, so why shouldn't there be bigger and weirder ones the harder you look?
