Science can be many things. Ambitious. Awe-inspiring. Confusing. Elegant. Wrong. And Creepy. Fortunately for you, the WIRED Science team doesn't fear the creepy and instead (often) finds it fascinating. We've been enjoying some really weird, gross and shiver-causing science this year, and we've collected our favorites here for you. Several of these stories elaborate on the rather stomach-churning theme of scientists growing parasitic organisms... in their own bodies. Right. So, to that end, please don’t miss this discussion of the botfly, which -- though not a new discovery -- is probably among the foulest of Earth’s creatures. Giant new tarantula We happen to like spiders, so finding a new giant tarantula with an 8-inch leg span and bright, geometric patterning doesn’t so much creep us out as make us go "Eff yeah!” But the fact is, the newly discovered Spider The Size Of Your Face (a phrase that even Stephen Colbert adopted) is probably among the top creepy science discoveries of this year... for most people. We broke the story in April after reading a description of the new species, named Poecilotheria rajaei, published by the British Tarantula Society. The spider belongs to a family known for being colorful, fast, and venomous. It was found living in trees and the old doctor’s quarters of a hospital near Mankulam, in northern Sri Lanka, by naturalist and educator Ranil Nanayakkara. Unfortunately, as is increasingly becoming the case with many spider species, P. rajaei is threatened by habitat destruction and loss. Image: Ranil Nanayakkara

Buddy, the parasitic nematode living in your mouth It takes a certain kind of person to realize that, for months, their mouth has been harboring a roving, parasitic worm and respond with, “Wow, that’s really interesting” instead of fighting the urge to light their face on fire. But that’s how biologist Jonathan Allen reacted when he discovered that the rough patch of skin traveling around in his mouth was really a coiled up worm, embedded just below the skin. So, he did what few people would do, and took the worm out himself. Obviously. Then, Allen carried the small, writhing critter to his lab at the College of William and Mary, and plopped it into some ethanol preservative. His colleague named the worm “Buddy,” then sequenced Buddy’s DNA and confirmed his identity. Buddy was a parasitic nematode, Gonglyonema pulchrum, and Allen was only the thirteenth person in the U.S. to have been infected by the species. Yay. Image: Buddy, the nematode, suspended in ethanol solution, courtesy of Jonathan D. Allen, Department of Biology, College of William and Mary

Bat-eating spiders are everywhere. We hate to say it, but it’s true: Spiders eat bats, and they’re probably doing it somewhere near you. Earlier this year, we reported a study describing the incidence of bat-eating among arachnids. Take-home: It’s way more common than we thought. The study included some totally rad and creepy photos of spiders caught in the act of ingesting flying mammals. Orb-weavers, social spiders, fishing spiders, tarantulas – they all eat bats. On every continent except Antarctica. Photo from Nyffeler M, Knörnschild M (2013) Bat Predation by Spiders. PLoS ONE 8(3): e58120. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0058120)

Rodent mind meld This year neuroscientists connected the brains of two rats with wires to create a rodent superbrain. Well, sort of. They showed that one rat was able to use signals from the other rat's brain to solve a problem it would otherwise have no clue how to solve (in this case, which hole to poke its nose into to get a reward). In other words, one rat had knowledge of something only the other rat had experienced. How creepy is that? Image: Katie Zhuang, Nicolelis lab, Duke University

Facebook kind of knows if you’re going to break up with your significant other. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Facebook is sort of smarmy and totally into exploiting all the information you reveal about yourself. But, in October, scientists showed that your data reveals how strong your relationship with your spouse or significant other is. The team came up with the algorithm that can do this by studying 1.3 million Facebook users. They found that 60 percent of the time, they could predict who your spouse is (out of all your possible friends), based only on how that person is connected to different, non-overlapping clusters of your friends (say, co-workers or college buds). For unmarried couples the algorithm guessed the right partner 50 percent of the time (which is still impressive given that the people in the study had between 50 and 2,000 friends for the algorithm to choose from). But here's where it gets really creepy: When the prediction algorithm failed to identify the (unmarried) significant other, it turned out the couple was 50 percent more likely to break up in the next two months. Dislike. Image: Xtreme_i/Flickr

Skeleton shrimp These are not the mangled, desiccated corpses of clawed aliens. They’re shrimp, and they swim in the ocean off the coast of California – near Los Angeles, actually. Unidentified until this year, Liropus minusculus would be a lot more terrifying if they were bigger. But we’re glad they’re not, because look at them. Image: SINC

The tick in your nose could be a new species. “When you first realize you have a tick up your nose, it takes a lot of willpower not to claw your face off," veterinary epidemiologist Tony Goldberg said in a statement. No kidding. Goldberg had been studying chimpanzee diseases in Uganda. Soon after he returned to the U.S., the University of Wisconsin professor discovered he’d been harboring a stowaway: A tick, lodged in his nostril. Nice. So, Goldberg did what any curious scientist would do. He plucked it out. Then, wanting to know what, exactly, had hitched a ride to North America with its head shoved through his skin, Goldberg sequenced the tick’s DNA. Turns out, the stowaway could very well be a never-before-identified species of bloodsucking arachnid (yes, like spiders, ticks are arachnids). But that remains to be determined. One thing is for sure, though – in their efforts to prevail over nitpicking, well-groomed chimpanzees, ticks might have discovered one of the better hiding places on a chimp. Image: John Tann/Flickr

Bees know how much sex their queen has had. Bees. Normally favored among insects, these precious – and necessary – pollinators live in colonies with complex social structures. But those honeybees in hives also have a dark side. Worker bees, the daughters of the queen bee, decide when to kill their queen. Usually, that happens when the queen starts sending chemical signals that tell her workers she’s not in such good shape. But, workers can dispatch their queen if they sense that she hasn’t had enough sex. In other words, “Bees can smell how much sex their queen has had,” wrote Elizabeth Preston, on Inkfish. Rrrright. Bees emit what are called pheromones – chemical messages that relay information to other individuals. Queens that have mated with many male bees, called drones, produce different pheromones than those who have only mated with a few – or none. Because keeping levels of genetic diversity high within the hive is beneficial, queens that have mated with more males should be more favored by the worker bees. And, as it turns out, workers are more attracted to pheromones produced by queens that are full of semen than those that have been artificially mated with saltwater-producing syringes. Image: Eugene Zalenko/Wikimedia