What do you actually do against Stowaways?

Edit: Thanks for the replies, the wiki really doesn't explain a lot of things about it, hence the confusion. My problem was caused by the Stowaway "sleeping" in that cycle. Stowaways attack if you touch the tiny appendage that is attach to their mouths. Stowaways can be unactive in a cycle, meaning the appendage won't appear. To make a Stowaway active, just hit it with a rock, it drops the appendage no matter whether the Stowaway was previously active or not.

I'm HORRIBLY terrified of the Stowaways, I'm bad at detecting them, but I'm good at detecting where they can be due to the color pallete almost every single room with them has, but that leaves me stranded, because I don't like Subterranean, I never go there unless I have to, but Stowaways guard multiple routes I'd like to not fear anymore.

I booted up Safari mode and spawned a controllable slugcat, I went to it and it's just frozen, not activating, I started mouse dragging the slugcat to see if anything would work. I ended up accidentally dragging the controllable slugcat into the Stowaway's killbox and froze the game, but I was able to exit Safari mode (the game still crashed a while later). With Safari out of the question, could someone tell me when do Stowaways activate? Can you just run through? Is it possible to still survive if you get stunned by it?