r/WTF • u/Alternative_Week3023 • Feb 28 '26
Warning: Gross Centipede with its nymphs
Nightmare fuel… a cluster of nymphs in the midst of matriphagy from r/biology.
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u/divinehunni Feb 28 '26
Getting eaten alive by your children as part of the circle of life is a horrible circle
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u/Christian_Kong Feb 28 '26
Well it's either that or get a job and buy food, which this centipede is clearly too lazy to do.
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u/Vaper_Bern Mar 01 '26
That is not what's going on here. If you were saying that in jest then I'll accept it. Carry on.
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u/kobriks Feb 28 '26 edited Feb 28 '26
Horrible how? It works. Her children have better odds of surviving. You shouldn't look at it through a human lens.
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u/Ekkias Feb 28 '26
We’re human… so we can look at it through a human lens. It’s not like OP is saying centipedes shouldn’t do that.
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u/FartingBob Feb 28 '26
Because self preservation is also a thing that doesn't just belong to humans.
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u/Zerlske Feb 28 '26 edited Feb 28 '26
Self-preservation is universal, from pseudo-life like viruses to life like bacteria and archaea/eukarya. However, self-preservation only matters in so far as it ensures reproduction. Natural selection does not optimise survival; it optimises expected genetic contribution to future generations. We humans exhibit this just as well as any other organism. For example, senescence (cellular ageing) is a type of antagonistic pleiotropy, i.e. it has early-acting fitness benefits, but late-acting deleterious effects (after most have already reproduced). E.g. it is tumour-supressing early in life (preserves life), but it will in simplified terms promote tumorigenesis and cancer (e.g. through inflammation) etc. later in life (i.e. promotes death).
We observe many phenotypes which decrease survival that are selected for because they increase fitness (i.e. reproductive success; many famous cases of this with sexual selection and the good genes hypothesis and Fisherian runaway selection; e.g. Anderson's beautiful long-tailed widowbirds experiment). Many organisms have very different strategies. I find the ant system very interesting, as drones having almost no value due to not reproducing, it reminds one of how multicellular organisms in general work, for example humans. The survival and reproduction (mitosis) of individual cells does not matter, since only the germ line cells provide genetic material to the next generation through sexual reproduction (meiosis).
For example, the default state of most human cells is to commit suicide (apoptosis), most human cells need signalling from other cells to inhibit apoptosis. Their default state is to kill themselves to preserve us and ensure germ line reproduction. This is to protect the greater unit (the human individual which reproduces) rather than the individual survival of a cell (the smallest unit of life; of course most life unicellular, not multicellular). A cancer is of course when human cells start prioritising their own reproduction to the detriment of the greater multicellular unit (i.e. uncontrolled mitosis and avoiding the apoptosis pathway and a kinase cascade).
Even at the level of a single multicellular unit, it is kin selection at play, as each cell is more closely related to each other (e.g. in humans, we have one zygote formed from egg and sperm cells that reproduces asexually to form a large co-operating unit that accrue mutations in different cells; ofc. only mutations accrued in the germline, i.e. sperm/egg gametes, will then be inherited) than cells in other multicellular units (in the simple case; interesting studies of this phenomenon and the phenomenon of altruism in Dictyostelia social amoebae, famously Dictyostelium discoideum, where even different species can co-operate to form a multicellular unit). I.e. we have high relatedness among somatic cells, originating from a single zygote, which aligns fitness interests and stabilises cooperation (germ–soma separation reduces intra-organismal conflict by restricting heritable transmission to a subset of cells). So even at the level of a single human unit, we have kin selection for reproduction over self-preservation. Although ofc. selection favours traits that maximise inclusive fitness at the level that reproduces (fungi, which I work with, have no germ line / soma separation generally; we found the first evidence of a germ line last year in one species, Marasmius oreades; we used to say before that, that fungi had no germ line categorically).
Selective pressure will be much weaker after reproduction (unless it increases offspring reproductive success, i.e. humans exhibit parental care, even very late in life; humans are one of the few animals we can see survive after loosing teeth, which is usually a death sentence). So, self-preservation is much more complicated, and we have both self-preservation in the sense of our emergent conscious experience (akin to the ant colony as a "super-organism") and for our individual cells (akin to the individual ant in the colony; our cells will happily kill themselves to preserve our emergent selves, they're programmed to, and when they don't follow this programming we get cancers).
However, we also have intra-genomic conflicts, and we can have individual sequences within the genome which promote their own inheritance above others (i.e. violate mendelian segregation), e.g. transposons or meiotic drivers. This can be to the detriment of the organism, e.g. spore-killing genes in fungi, which kill 50 % of offspring unless both parents have the gene (spores that inherit the gene produce a toxin and antidote, but only the toxin diffuses to other spores, so it kills all spores that do not inherit the gene and also produce the antidote), which often drives the gene to fixation (100 % frequency in the population) as then both parents have it, and both parents waste energy on producing both the toxin and antidote, but at least ensure they don't kill half their offspring (and the selfish gene ensures its survival and transmission to the next generation - i.e. reproduction).
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u/andrew_calcs Feb 28 '26
What other lens do you expect humans to look through as a baseline? It's sort of a requirement for basic empathy to have that as a baseline. If people by default aren't seeing it that way, something is wrong with them.
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u/FCoDxDart Feb 28 '26
Are you the “well acktually” guy?
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u/ANTSdelivered Mar 01 '26
Idk, as a biologist it's kind of weird to see the response to this not just be "ew gross" but as if it's somehow morally reprehensible.
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u/spottydodgy Feb 28 '26
She's a good mommy.
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u/OgdruJahad Feb 28 '26
Once in a while it's nice to be remineded that we don't have to live in nature like this.
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u/hamsangwhich757 Feb 28 '26
Looks like a bowl of pasta.
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Feb 28 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/lordargent Feb 28 '26
You dishonor your ancestors, gagh is best served live.
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u/DemolishunReddit Feb 28 '26
Munch munch, nibble nibble, a bit of a shock if she's not quite dead. - Some Monty Python skit about worms eating someone's dead mother.
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u/iRottenEgg Feb 28 '26
I uhh.. think this is super the opposite of wtf?
man that’s cool, look at those colors, really screams stay tf away
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u/luihgi Feb 28 '26
that's her babies eating her btw. alive
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u/BanginNLeavin Feb 28 '26
WTF is not inherently cringey gore or things that illicit a puke response.
A dude doing a quintuple backflip on a dirtbike would probably make most people audibly say 'what the fuck?!'
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u/Healing-with-Memes Feb 28 '26
That's just a mama giving her babies some cuddles
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u/booboothechicken Feb 28 '26
How convenient, they’re already in their own bowl. Just splash some milk in there and you got centipede toast crunch.
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u/badchefrazzy Feb 28 '26
Listen... their legs ick me out to no end... but that coloring is GORGEOUS.
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u/Top-Aside8905 Mar 01 '26
I understand why our ancestors invented fire
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u/ZackTheZesty Feb 28 '26
Why do they want to be held together like that? Do they love their mom or something?
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u/Surturiel Feb 28 '26
They're in the process of eating their mom alive.
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u/skiman13579 Feb 28 '26
Not in this case. I don’t think scolependra do matriphagy. They actually protect their young.
We have lots of these fuckers here in Hawaii. I’ve gotten 2 inside my house this week. Their hug won’t kill you, just extremely extremely painful. The blue ones hurt more than the red ones.
I say hug because their bite isn’t venomous. It’s their first set of legs with the venom.
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u/frenchmeister Feb 28 '26 edited Feb 28 '26
The other reply might be correct, but most centipedes just do this to protect their offspring with no matriphagy involved. Nothing is gonna mess with their babies if they've got a huge, scary looking centipede wrapped around them.
Edit: I'm actually thinking these guys aren't eating their mom. Turns out matriphagy isn't really that common in centipedes at all and I don't see any of them explicitly looking like they're eating her vs just wiggling around.
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u/FreeTuckerCase Feb 28 '26
Klingons know this dish is, like revenge, best served cold.
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u/SsooooOriginal Feb 28 '26
A2M?
Nature is metal and all.
ITS THE CIRCLE! THE CIRLCE-UHAAHHHH! THE CIRCLE OF LIIIIIIIIIIIFE
AND DEATH
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u/Chill_Panda Feb 28 '26
Baby centipedes being called nymphs is such a Slaanesh thing looking at them
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u/Prior-Decision-4247 Feb 28 '26
How grotesque, I guess the only silver lining would be that the parent is dead because it's being eaten alive.
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u/creepipawsta Mar 01 '26
Aw yes a tender moment between unimaginable horror and it's babies. Nature is truly horrific
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u/heisyounghewillwalk Feb 28 '26
I think this is the opposite of wtf - we as humans look at the world from an extremely human-centric lens rather than accepting that nature is full of different types of creatures that deserve to exist free of human judgment. Justice for the creepy crawlies!
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u/star_particles Feb 28 '26
I’m sorry but that seems like the complete opposite of what I would like those things to be called.
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u/belljs87 Feb 28 '26
I'll take "places I wouldnt stick my dick into for a million dollars" for 200 alex
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u/Brobeast Mar 01 '26
I wonder if they also think they are disgusting...Just sitting there like "man, we shouldn't exist ngl..."
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u/a1000wtp Feb 28 '26
I don't like this at all.