Spiders, encounters, and horrifying experiences

God. When I first moved to Florida, this UNNATURALLY HUGE SPIDER lived in my bathroom. Right above the toilet. I refused to go there until my parents, being a nurse (my dad) and a retired health officer/spider etimologist, got it in a plastic thing. It was big, black and moved insanely fast.

When I went camping in Big Bend many years ago, I couldn't stop playing with the millipedes there. They are about half a foot and everywhere. You can see them crossing the road as you drive. Vinegaroons are probably the coolest thing I ever saw in west Texas. Back in south-central Texas we also had windscorpions, but they were smaller, paler, and less hairy than the one pictured earlier in this thread. They also never came in my house (probably because the high volume of scorpions that came in our house would kill them). For a couple of years I had a small pet scorpion from Texas that I captured as it tried to run up my leg. I fed it one of these big LA cockroaches (which are basically like the big Houston cockroaches except I haven't seen them fly in LA) one day and it didn't eat for 3 months afterward.

The coolest bug I've seen in LA so far has to be the House Centipede.

One night around midnight in central Los Angeles, I found a pigmentless pink salamander (no, not a gecko, a salamander) with huge black eyes and semi-transparent skin stalking around some sprinklers in a flower bed. Nearby I also found a worm that was so disgusting I wanted to throw up. I've never been able to figure out what the worm was, but maybe someone here knows.

The worm was about as thick as a standard piece of spaghetti and fairly long. The head was flat and spade-shaped but without the pointy tip. When I picked it up was when I noticed the head and the two flayed out sections (like the humpy parts of a spade) kind of... pulsated, like trying to grab onto something. My stomach immediately turned as images of parasitic worms flashed through my mind. I tried to let go of it, but its mucousal secretions were extremely sticky and it wouldn't come off. I couldn't use my other hand because the salamander was happily sitting in my palm, enjoying my body heat. I kind of scraped my hand against some dirt to loosen it and then flung my hand to make it release. Since its tail portion was still stuck to the ground, its front end sprung back towards the tail and it ended up all scrunched together in a sticky ball of itself, it's "head" portion still looking like it wanted to grab onto something. It was really surreal and I feel nauseous just thinking about it.

However, the salamander was cute (I let it go back where I found it).

I guess the thought of parasites is my achilles heel. One time I saw tapeworms in human feces behind a church in Long Beach and it was all I could do not to vomit. If anyone knows what that worm was (or even what kind of salamander it was), let me know.

Did it look like this? If so, then it was a Planarian. Which is are primarily carnivorous flatworms-with a three-branched digestive cavity. They can eat other living, as well as dead, invertebrates, detritus, decaying organic matter and diatoms. (Which is well, pretty much everything.) But they are kind of cute. You know with the human looking eye ball thing and all....