Skeletonize!

Apparently President Theodore Roosevelt was somewhat misled when he informed the reading public that piranhas will strip a mammal to the bone in minutes. To be fair, his book about his Amazon River expedition never uses the graphic term "skeletonize," but he did say the following:

If cattle are driven into, or of their own accord enter, the water, they are commonly not molested; but if by chance some unusually big or ferocious specimen of these fearsome fishes does bite an animal—taking off part of an ear, or perhaps of a teat from the udder of a cow—the blood brings up every member of the ravenous throng which is anywhere near, and unless the attacked animal can immediately make its escape from the water it is devoured alive.

Which is pretty close. But this Mental Floss article says that when they knew the former president was on the way, the natives purposely starved a bunch of the river fish to make them seem more ferocious. Put on a show for the great man. It doesn't explain why Roosevelt noted that "in every river town in Paraguay there are men who have been thus mutilated" by the piranha, though.

It's been more than a hundred years since Roosevelt's book was published, and we're still thinking of those mean river fish as Gary Larson put it:

I've never seen a fish skeletonize anything, but I've seen worms skeletonize a leaf:

So gross.

Look at the bones!

Yes, it's our old friend the leafroller, those little green worms that chew up a bunch of leaves and then make their escape by hanging down on little web lines. They are almost cute individually, but they become disgusting in the large numbers in which they appear. A lot of things are like that; they aren't so bad in little doses but destroy things in mobs. (Idea for new animated movie: an evil arborist tries to kill a cute little leafroller for 90 minutes of film time. Important that we never see more than one worm and his immediate family.)

Fortunately the leafroller doesn't usually damage a whole tree, and they're not nearly as disgusting as tent caterpillars, which are a great argument for nuking things from orbit.

The house I grew up in was surrounded by huge oak trees, and I clearly remember at least one year that featured the Summer of Pinworms. (Not actually pinworms, but we didn't know what they were called, and someone said they were pinworms.) The pathway leading from our house, always shaded by the oaks, would have these little green drops suspended in air. You'd open the front door and it would look like a drizzle had frozen in time. Until you got to the car and realized you had fifteen worms on you.

If you did a horizontal karate chop on the web line, you might wind up with the web dangling from your hand, the worm none the wiser. Which was kind of a neat trick, but then you had to get rid of the worm.

So I've always found these worms interesting, but not when they're on me. Ewww! It got in my shirt! Yuck! But clearly I have not been skeletonized yet.

I could stand to lose a few pounds, though. Got any piranhas?