The Weird Corner of YouTube Where Bugs Fight to the Death

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The Weird Corner of YouTube Where Bugs Fight to the Death

The videos of human-orchestrated death matches get millions of views and can actually teach us a little about ourselves.

For centuries we have been watching animals fight to the death for our entertainment: man vs. man, lions vs man, tigers vs panthers, wolverines vs warthogs and now, thanks to YouTube and high-def iPhones, insects vs. other insects.

It's a blood sport—more often than not these bug gladiatorial videos end with the death of one of the insects and, somewhat surprisingly, it's very popular (like mulit-million views popular.)

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These aren't encounters filmed in the wild. Instead, these insects are either bought or found and put into a terrarium and forced to fight. There are thousands of these videos, some garner hundreds of thousands to millions of views and come from all across the globe. In this world you can find whatever you want: a wasp taking on a millipede; a tarantula taking on a dung beetle; hell, you can even find black widow taking on a scorpion. They run the gamut in style as well: some have commentary while others are deathly silent, a few are filmed on expensive cameras but a good portion are clearly filmed on your creepy neighbour's iPhone 6.

Understandably, some of you will be repulsed by these videos, but on the flip side will feel intrigued and want to watch more—a, probably more substantial subsect, won't care in any way. It's safe to assume that a majority of us would be disgusted by dog-fighting but it's different with bugs. Why is that? I reached out to an expert for some answers, but first, let's take a closer look at these fight videos.

We're going to start with a channel named Insect TV. At first the channel's trailer makes it look like a typical nature channel with a predilection for insects but at the end of it a massive "FIGHT" comes over the screen and the creator makes his findings fight in a bucket or glass terrarium. Insect TV now sits at 16,000 subscribers. One of their video "Japanese Giant Hornet vs European Wasps Fight" has grabbed a little over three million views.

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Like many of these YouTubers, Insect TV states that the "video was made for educational purposes"—like all good educational videos, this one is set to a song called "I Don't Give A Mother f* *k." On this channel you'll find a giant wolf spider taking on praying mantis or, in a video that's actually a huge bummer, a bunch of red ants killing a scorpion.

Other channels—as in more than one—seem to reuse what can only be described as an older Japanese TV show or web series and either add music to it or dub in their own commentary. The best part of these videos, bar none, is the cheesy CGI opening and the super stoked Japanese commentators. Some of these channels give their fighters names—my favourite is Lil' Diablo the beetle vs. Judas Grief the scorpion. One channel like this, called V for Venom, even started a Patreon account but in the end only got $3 a month for his videos.

Some of the videos take a more gladiatorial coliseum take on the death matches. In a very popular series of weekly videos, a man named Leo created what he calls "A Tank of Death." Inside the tank exists several Red Backs (the cranky Australian counterpoint to the Black Widow). Leo catches all sorts of bugs, newts, and whatnot, which he then puts into the tank to see how long they'll last. Over the top of the videos Leo gives warm, genuine commentary—it's very odd, almost wholesome to a point.

Leo now has about a million followers, and this seems to be his most successful series in the history of his channel. The series is now in it's ninth week and his subscriber count has exploded during its run. Some of the bugs get names from the commentators or Leo and people start rooting for the bugs to survive week after week—a weird looking beetle named Gonzo in particular captured the hearts of the comment section until it was killed a week or two in. Several commentators even posted tributes to Gonzo after it's death.

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One of the most interesting things in the series run came about when Leo introduced a two small lizards to the spider tank. When these guys were killed, a large percentage of the comment section lost their goddamn minds.

Leokimvideo's set up for filming the videos.

"Leokimvideo you are sadistic, trapping creatures in a small tank with no way to escape and forcing them to go through a slow, torturous death is not nature, all the while you take pleasure in it," one commenter wrote. "The only creep here is you. That lizard suffered hugely, only because of you. "

Other comments indicated that Leo received death threats for these videos. Leo addresses the negative feedback several times in the videos by saying this is these deaths are what happens in nature. To get a take on how and why these people make the videos VICE reached out to numerous bug barons but none responded to interview requests.

The more interesting question is: why are so many people drawn to these videos at the same time will gladly burn a person at the stake who makes two pomeranians go at it? Well, a big part of it comes from the fact we can identify and emphasize with dogs—we have them as pets, they bleed like us, they make noise—in a way the majority of us just can't with insects. In essence, these battles exist in a moral grey zone.

The dying lizard bites at a Red Back spider in the Tank of Death.

Using evolutionary science, human history, and contemporary psychology, Dr. Jeffrey Lockwood quite literally wrote the book on why and how humans react to insects. In an interview with VICE, Lockwood said that humans are drawn to insects, like other small scittery creatures draw our eye, because, in the past, they were either there to harm us or feed us—the phrase he used was "squeal or meal."

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"What happens is, on top of that initial response, culture tells us how we should respond," Lockwood told VICE. "Culture tells us when we see insects to respond negatively because they aren't a snack anymore.

"That negative response primes us so that when we put them together in a cage and make them do battle, we're not highly empathetic. We almost see them as automatons, like heartless programmed biological programs. They're not sufficiently like us enough to provoke any empathy, but they are sufficiently animal-like to provoke fascination."

Fighting insects for fun is nothing new. For centuries a cricket fighting tradition has existed in China where people breed, train, and fight crickets. It was outlawed for quite a while but the ban was lifted in 1976—and recently cricket fighting has been experiencing a comeback.

There is serious money in the cricket game. According to the Ningyang Cricket Research Institute and the New York Times, over 400 million renminbi ($63 million US) was spent on housing and buying crickets in 2010. Thinking critically about it, there seems to be a difference, albeit a hard one to express, between cricket fighting and these videos on Youtube—as Lockwood puts it, "it's not just throw two creatures in a bowl and see what happens.

"It feels a little bit like say bullfighting in Spain or Portugal, which I'm not defending here, it's a blood sport but it has deep, deep traditions, long roots and a complex cultural history as opposed to putting a crab and a goliath beetle in a terrarium," said Lockwood.

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A Emperor Scorpion takes on a Giant Asian Hornet. Photo via screenshot.

There is just something about death and suffering that draws us in, it's a primal human curiosity. In this content people can satisfy that urge for the macabre—an urge that taps directly into our darkest fascinations—without the moral repercussions that would come with watching real-world death in almost any other setting.

"I think what people have latched onto are these alien, monstrous creatures that are robot-like that seem to be programmed and heartless," said Lockwood. "We don't think they experience pain but they do experience death and dismemberment.

"It's in that realm that we can experience death and violence in an organism for which we recognize a kind of empathetic connection but not so much empathy that we're repulsed by what we're seeing… I wonder if they made sounds, they bled and we believed that they really felt pain if it would move it out of this realm."

It is, in essence, a kind of sociologically approved sadism.

A praying mantis fighting a wolf spider on Insects TV.

Lockwood said that videos that take a much more naturalistic approach would, in a way that's hard to articulate, may be less of a strain on the moral part of your brain. These videos exist in spades—the most prominent being Monster Bug War, a TV show that has migrated their vids to YouTube. Monster Bug War actually adds in mammal noises over the bugs to give it that disturbing edge—trust me, watching a cockroach scream while being wrapped up by a spider is fucking weird.

The science, technically, is still out in regards to whether or not insects can feel something akin to what we call pain but there seems to be enough evidence gained through methods like deterring insects with shocks and and research into their physiology for, as Dr. Lockwood puts it, to see there is "reasonable circumstantial evidence for us to suppose they can feel pain"—there is still a high level of uncertainty on the subject, however. That said, rolling the dice on whether or not these bugs are suffering or feeling pain during these fights makes the matches, according to Lockwood, "unacceptable."

"I just don't think the gamble for the entertainment value is worth the chance that we're imposing suffering," he told VICE.

Follow Mack Lamoureux on Twitter.