I may be the only documented case of a human being on this planet to have been bitten by this bug.

For the past several years, July 29th has been a day for anomaly. The anomaly of 2021 involved this lovely entity, called acanthocephala terminalis, a leaf-footed bug that, for too long, I misidentified as an Assassin Bug. To be fair, it exhibited some assassin-like behaviour. Sat down in a lawn chair outside my door, guy was lying in wait on the underside; jabbed me good on the back of the thigh, super painful, got me again on the front. Bites turned neon orange for like, three weeks. Was it only a bite, or an injection? I caught this mf and it spent three days in a Tupperware outside before the guilt of incarcerating a living creature got to me and I released it.
So why does it matter? If we juxtapose the knowledge that external variables can very much cause epigenetic changes, what are the implications?