Grossopedia: A Startling Collection of Repulsive Trivia You Won’t Want to Know!. Rachel Federman

Greatest Boss”?

      Ocean Whopper

      In the Bible, Jonah spends three days inside the belly of a whale. Finally God ordered the whale to upchuck the prophet. If it had been a blue whale, Jonah could have fit neatly inside a blood vessel. A blue whale’s blood vessels are wider than your entire body!

      The Last Supper—as in, the One You Just Had

      When a wolf returns to the pack from a solo romp, the other wolves lick its mouth to see if any prey has been captured and eaten. But that’s not the gross part. If any prey is detected, the swallower is supposed to share by regurgitation. Now that’s grossitating! Our guess is that they eat pretty fast at least. The expression “to wolf it down” has to come from somewhere.

      It’s Raining Snakes

      It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a…flying snake! Their official name is chrysopelea, but the truth is, these fellows don’t actually fly. Instead, they crawl to the end of a tree branch and launch. They do a good enough job of gliding by twisting their bodies back and forth between an S and a C shape that they appear to be flying as they make their way down.

      Double-Duty Sucker

      Octopuses use one of their arms in the process of reproduction. The hectocotylus arm is particularly flexible—that’s the one males use to enter the female cavity and fertilize the eggs. But wait, there’s more. Some kinds of octopuses up the grossness ante by leaving part of that arm behind. The female receives the sperm, along with a sacrificial limb. (The male dies soon after, so perhaps the amputation is not a big a deal in the overall scheme of things.)

       “A Giant Mutant Rat” and “The Dead Body under the Christmas Tree”—these headlines are horrible, so why do we keep reading? Blood and gore in black and white—it’s the modern-day version of watching gladiators fight. There’s just some primal hankering in humans for blood and disgust that attracts and repels us at the same time. Kind of like a magnet if the two sides overlapped. But then it wouldn’t be a magnet. Okay, we need a better metaphor here. In the meantime, press on through the weird and terrible stranger-than-fiction truth! And be glad you’re not in print, at least for these stories.

      Monster Rat

      New York City subways are notoriously rat infested, but Jose Rivera was in for a surprise when he came upon a group of gigantic, mutant white rats in Brooklyn, where he was working for the housing authority. He ended up stabbing and killing one with a pitchfork. A wildlife expert believed the super-size rodent was likely a Gambian pouched rat that had once been a house pet (which, in our estimation, is even weirder than the image of one running loose outside).

      Something’s Buggin’ Me

      In 2004, National Geographic published a report called “For Most People, Eating Bugs Is Only Natural”. Examples throughout history and even the modern age are plentiful, from Aristotle’s advice on harvesting cicadas—full of eggs, if you’re lucky—to the coconut and ginger dragonflies favored in Bali today. (see Bizarre Cuisine for lots of great recipe ideas.)

      Nailed the Landing