People like to compare spitting spiders to Spider-Man because nothing in this world is sacred. The two basically have nothing in common. Spitting spiders, for instance, look awful wearing glasses. And Spider Man doesn’t eat insects. Moreover, the only thing venomous about Spider Man was, well, Venom. Spitting spiders, by contrast, hawk venomous goo loogies and are far more terrifying than amazing.

Drawing from National Geographic‘s documentary Super Spider, Nerdist described the innards and outflows of expectorating arachnids. Their strange ability derives from having an extra web duct which contains an amalgam of silk, glue, and venom. So rather than waiting patiently for food like a typical web-weaver, these eight-legged assassins take their snares with them. Once they pick a bug from Nature’s menu, they position their fangs like tiny pistols and bombard their target with death paste. The lethal slime stream travels at up to 62 miles per hour and contracts on contact, sealing both the victim and its fate.

It’s hard to imagine something worse than a machine gun arachnid with toxic ammo. But Nature works in misanthropic ways and has already invented a scarier alternative: slime-slinging gangs. According to National Geographic, Singaporean spitting spiders hunt in groups when they’re young. Once they’re old enough to leave the nest, which in this case is a web, younglings massacre insects in units of four or more. As time passes, they mature into lone gunmen, capping fools with their oozy Uzis and occasionally eating each other. 

Fans of aural discharge have probably heard of otitis media, a bacterial infection of the middle ear. Marked by fluid buildup, impaired balance, pain, and general yuckiness, otitis media afflicts millions of children annually. Physicians have historically treated the ailment with antibiotics. But as noted by Science Daily, symptoms keep resurfacing in some children, haunting their ears like a bored, lonely ghost. Experts initially blamed this on separate instances of infection, but in 2006 they concluded something far worse.

Researchers at three U.S. hospitals formed a science Voltron to determine the cause of recurring ear infections. As it turns out, the answer is ear slime. Bacterial communes, or biofilms, besiege children’s ear canals by deploying a nigh-impenetrable mucus shield. The tactic is so effective that even antibiotics prove futile, leaving drainage tubes as the only (somewhat) viable defense. That’s right. For all its dazzling sophistication, modern medicine can’t outwit slime.

Before you cram a box of Q-tips in your ears (and make it worse), keep in mind that not every infected head has invincible mucus living in it. Acute but nonrecurring versions of the malady still respond to antibiotics. And even in chronic cases, researchers didn’t always find biofilms –- only 92 percent of the time. If you assume that figure applies generally, then even if you grew up with super sickly ears or have them now, you might belong to the lucky 8 percent in the clear. You’d still have painful, leaky ears, but at least you don’t have slimy, painful leaky ears.

Audrey II notwithstanding, humans usually view plants as decorations or salad. Exceptions like poison ivy exist, but even those get treated more like nuisances than nightmares. That portrait of harmlessness fades, however, once you enter the world of carnivorous plants. Once you meet the pitcher plant, the picture gets Dorian-Gray-ugly.

Native to tropical Asia, pitcher plants are nature’s lethal ale horns. Only, rather than holding alcohol, they function in ways that make you want to drink to forget. As per Science Daily, the plants produce sweet nectar that brings all the bugs to their yard. Bugs approach their basins, enticed by the promise of a lovely snack. Instead, they become the snack. Any creature unfortunate enough to enter the plant slides helplessly into a pit of digestive slime that dissolves the victim and swallows it like quicksand. The more it resists, the faster it sinks into oblivion. 

Suddenly, Audrey II doesn’t sound so vicious. She seems downright affable compared to the Nepenthes attenboroughii. Named for the great David Attenborough, this species of pitcher plant resides in the Philippines, where it devours full-sized rats,according to The Telegraph. Christian missionaries stumbled across the plant in 2000 and presumably broke into uncontrollable sobbing before telling experts what they saw. Seven years later, a British research team scaled a mountain to confirm the eco rat trap’s existence. Had this been a horror flick, those scientists would have become plant food. Perhaps some of them did.

The Blob is a 1958 creature feature about marauding space goop that insatiably eats its surroundings. As it tears its way through humanity, the interstellar jelly continually increases in size. Unsettling, right? Well, guess what. Earth has its own Blob equivalent: algae. That might sound preposterous initially, but when you discover how it rolls, you may change your mind.

Consisting of countless microbes, algae grow in ponds, lakes, and oceans across the world. As noted by the Washington Post, when algae form vast colonies known as blooms, they thicken water to a soupy consistency. That sounds like cause to grab a large spoon and some seasoning, but you’d be eating it at your own peril. Blue-green algae, for instance, boast an infamous fluorescent hue that gels with their otherworldly ability to poison waterways on an epic scale.

Utah’s inventively named Utah Lake suffered a massive algae bloom in 2016 that caused 130 cases of skin rash, vomiting, and butt fudge. That same year, USA Today reported that the microbes forced Florida to declare a state of emergency. The outlet additionally mentioned that algae toxins may spur Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. And just think: they’re everywhere. According to National Geographic, toxic algae were implicated in the 2015 deaths of over 300 whales near Chile. In South Africa, they murdered enough salmon to fill 14 Olympic swimming pools. And as global temperatures rise, these tiny terrors of the sea could grow even more pervasive.