Thinking About Moving To An Island? This Just Scared Me

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Scary Tropical Bugs

My wife and I have been talking about moving to an island for some time now.  3 years ago we set a goal of 3-5 years and we will move.  Well the time has come to start really digging in and making it happen.  So my wife has been looking at island homes, on just about every island.  The original thought was Costa Rica or Belize.  My wife found this amazing home in Costa Rica, and BOOM it’s settled she wants to live in Costa Rica, this home is like a “fairytale”, big enough for her family to come and stay all at once, pool, ocean view, affordable, monkeys, you pick something on her list and it had it…except the outdoor bath tub and toilet…don’t ask!

So, last week was her birthday and we went out to dinner and she was telling her uncle all about this house she found and how perfect it is, you guys have to visit, blah blah blah!  Her uncle, who is an intelligent individual and avid gardener, said “Oh no!  There are over 130 deadly snakes in Costa Rica!”  Cue my wife Googling this fact and freaking out!  There are over 130 deadly snakes indigenous to Costa Rica, some the most deadly in the world, not to mention spiders bigger than our 7lb yorkie-poo, flying cockroaches, Hercules beetles that look like a mini rhinoceros, centipedes/millipedes, and even poisonous caterpillars.  Really…caterpillars? True story!

So furthermore, she Googles “islands with the least dangerous bugs and insects” and stumbles upon yet another website to give her nightmares for the rest of her life that tells her the 5 Scariest bugs/insects in the world.  And of course she had to share this terrifying information with me!  So scratch the following places off your bucket list and pick somewhere that it is less likely you will die from bugs!

Scary Tropical Bugs

Number 1: Japan, Japanese Giant Hornet- approximately the size of your thumb, and will basically spray acid in your eyes that attracts the rest of these super sized hornets to come and sting you dead.

Number 2: Rainforest of Nicaragua to Paraguay, Bullet Ant- this bad boy packs a sting so powerful it literally feels like you have been shot…enough said, oh wait and I think they like to jump on your head as you are peacefully hiking in the forest.

Number 3: South and Central America/American Southwest, Africanized Honey Bee- bees are already scary, especially when you get stung all the time like my wife does, but these bees are far more angry and give you less of a chance to get away when you make them mad.  To make matters worse a human actually created these monsters.

Number 4: Amazon Basin (subfamilies in Asia and Africa), Army or Soldier Ant- these guys are not to be messed with…seriously they will eat you and they won’t even know that you are a human, because they are blind.  They can attach to each other and build a wall, that’s pretty fancy considering they can’t see a thing.  They have been known to eat an entire horse, along with other large animals I’m sure.

Number 5: Central and South America (some species allover the world), Bot-Fly-You may have already heard about these guys, possibly even watched a YouTube video of people removing them…GROSS!  These flies are genetically designed to target specific species, such as horses and humans.  These will be inconspicuously planted on you or in a horses mouth and hatch due to body heat and then they will feed on you till it gets fat and then  it releases and turns into a mature Bot-Fly who will lay eggs on another poor, unsuspecting horse or human and eat them too!  There has been a case where a human Bot-Fly has eaten a human brain.

Scary Tropical Bugs

So there you have it, mark these places off your list. I also strongly warn you to not Google them or watch the YouTube videos because you will start to itch and possibly want to live in a bubble.  I am not putting pictures on here because frankly, I like my readers and I don’t want to scare you away!  But I am going to put a video of a man that was bitten by a mosquito in Panama that was host to Bot-Fly eggs which eventually hatched under his skin.

The moral of the story is we are not likely to move to Costa Rica, and I totally understand my wife’s full blown fear of all bugs/insects.

Online Business & Marketing Specialist
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