When I was young, my mum tried to instill a good attitude when it came to bugs, telling me: "They're more scared of you than you are of them." It didn't work. To this day, I run whenever I see a spider. However, it looks like things will be different for Chrissy Teigen's daughter Luna.
On Wednesday, the model uploaded a video to Twitter of her holding a large, winged insect while on holiday with her family in Bali. Captioned "I swear to god if one of you tells me this is a deadly bug I will vomit", the footage shows the unidentified bug sitting on the 32-year-old's arm as she softly speaks to her two-year-old. "What is this, Luna?" she asks. "Is he a nice bug? Do you want to give him a kiss?"
All seemed well - until the model made the mistake of asking her followers what kind of bug she was dealing with, writing "time for another game of 'what's this bug!?'!" for the caption of the video. It was only then that she realised what she had done, and went on to get phenomenally mum-shamed by thousands of people on the social media site.
Her eagle-eyed followers soon informed her that she had been most likely holding a Tarantula Hawk Wasp, a creature that well and truly lives up to its horrifying name. According to the U.K.’s Natural History Museum, the tarantula hawk can serve up "the most painful wasp sting in the world", with American entomologist Justin Schmidt claiming that if someone was to ever get stung by one, they'd "just lie down and scream" describing the sting as "instantaneous, electrifying and totally debilitating".
In addition, the Tarantula Hawk uses its sting to paralyze its prey before dragging it to a brood nest, laying an egg inside of the prey, and letting the egg slowly eat the spider from the inside. Anyway, all in all, it's probably not one to play with.
Twitter was not shy at all about letting Chrissy know that she had probably been messing with the wrong bug, with Twitter user @carmerhatesu putting "chrissy teigen casually playing with a TARANTULA HAWK WASP with her CHILDREN and encouraging her daughter to KISS IT" and fellow user @pmversaverach writing "Chrissy.... girl I don’t even have words".
Unsurprisingly though, the model wasn't here for the wave of criticism sent her way, telling her attackers that she appreciated their evaluations, but to back off. "Oh dear here comes the fun.." the 32-year-old wrote. "okay should I not hold potentially deadly creatures? no. should I do it around my daughter? Super no. But it crawled on me and seemed injured and well, not angry, not scary. And I’m normally super freaked (remember house centipede??)"
She continued: "I put it down gently and he crawled right back. maybe it was my reincarnated relative. Or puddy the bulldog. Either way, everyone is okay and the world continues to turn... Anyhow bug and i are friends now. And perhaps with time, lovers."
Ironically, after the story had exploded, the Washington Post published an article claiming that they had been informed by experts that the bug in question wasn't actually a Tarantula Hawk Wasp. Was all that fuss for nothing?
All we know for sure is that the people of the internet will happily shame anyone over anything.
