And I’m not even sharing the room with anything but my own sense of astonishment! Things that have made me f-bomb so far:

• The Cave of Swallows in Mexico, which they introduced by having someone jump into it running at full speed. A minute later they were like “lol it’s 1300 feet tall and that guy was basejumping gotcha!” but it still blew my mind.
• Cave Glow Worms! That’s the video from the episode, featuring these worms that suspend themselves from the ceiling using mucus strands and drop down big sticky loogies to ensnare insects. Plus, they GLOW to attract them. And there’s a ton.
• Hundreds of thousands of cockroaches at the bottom of the Surawak Chamber. I do not trust an ecosystem that subsists on bat guano.
• Underwater caving, which involves squeezing through incredibly tight quarters, which often kicks up a big cloud of dirt that keeps you from seeing anything around.
• A halocline, the vertical in a cave’s water between freshwater and saltwater. They separate out into layers, sort of like the parts of your salad dressing. it may look like you’re surfacing for air, but you might just be transitioning between layers.
• Snakes that hang from the ceiling and use heatvision to snatch bats from midair.
• Sulfuric Acid caves that somehow still have fish and these weird bacterial booger things that hang from the ceiling. WTF.

This is feeding into the ur-fears of endless underground passageways that House of Leaves exposed to add up to something I probably shouldn’t be watching right before I go to bed.