Among the many strange biological wonders Charles Darwin observed in his time, one haunted him above all. “‘The eye, to this day, gives me a cold shudder,” he admitted in a letter to an American colleague, “but when I think of the fine known gradations, my reason tells me I ought to conquer the cold shudder.”

Whether the father of evolution overcame his fear is a mystery, but if he felt that way about the eyeball, his first sight of Trypanohyncha Ocellus, the “Alien: Earth” creature known as the eye midge, might have given him a heart attack. Our first look at it made my skin crawl, too, after I reflexively shielded my face.

As any seasoned horror movie fan can attest, few frights are as reliably nauseating as eyeball trauma. Darwin’s confessed heebie-jeebies about the unmolested eye hin

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