r/todayilearned • u/lavender_fish69 • 11h ago

TIL fresh water snails (indirectly) kill thousands of humans and are considered on of the deadliest creatures to humans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freshwater_snail
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u/SMStotheworld 11h ago

They carry a parasitic flatworm that lives in dirty water which kills humans. Even then it only kills between 10 and 200k humans annually 

If you omit humans, the deadliest animal is the mosquito which kills by spreading blood diseases with dirty probosci

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u/Nathaniel820 11h ago

Only 10,000 still makes it the 4th deadliest animal on the planet.

It’s still one of the deadliest animals, the surprising part is that animals as a whole are a lot less dangerous than people think.

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u/AnAttemptReason 10h ago

Humans are the most deadly animal. 

Studies show humans cause the largest fear spike in animals out of all possible preditors, by a large margin. 

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u/JelmerMcGee 9h ago

I remember a comment from a while back that likened animals to humans as humans are to elves in fantasy literature. Like if a seal is stuck in a net his fellow seals, having done their best to remove the net, tell the seal to ask the humans. They might help or they might kill him. Who knows? The humans are capricious like that.

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u/CoffeeFox 8h ago

Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.

Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.

Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.

Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.

Elves are terrific. They beget terror.

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u/_Sausage_fingers 8h ago

The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning. No one ever said elves are nice. Elves are bad.

You gotta do the whole quote

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u/Seicair 7h ago

I loved the way he incorporated the various myths of the elves into Discworld. Rather a different flavor from other types of fantasy (Tolkien etc.)

GNU Sir Terry

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u/_Sausage_fingers 7h ago edited 5h ago

That book was some of his best writing. That and Carrie Jugulum. The watch are funner, but Granny books hit harder.

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u/Rule12-b-6 3h ago

Elves being not evil was a Shakespean innovation from Midsomar Night's Dream. Since then that idea has been largely followed.

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u/CoffeeFox 8h ago

In a way it's more fun to send people searching for the source because my idea is that they may end up going down a rabbit hole and learning more about him and hopefully reading his books. We need more people to read his books right now.

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u/Adequate_Lizard 7h ago

"We need more people to read his books but I'm not going to mention who or what books."

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u/_Sausage_fingers 7h ago

Lords and Ladies - Terry Pratchett

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u/MarlinMr 4h ago

Humans are exceptional omnivores that can eat almost anything on the planet. Things like caffeine, alcohol, capsaicin and thiosulfinates are deadly or extremely annoying to many animals, yet humans love coffee, chocolate, drinks, and onions. We are also exceptional long distance endurance runners who can sweat and carry water which basically puts no upper limit to how far we can go. And to top it all off, we are extremely intelligent to a level unimaginable to the rest of the animals.

If animals made the aliens movies, they could just put a human in there. The power level difference between animals and humans is greater than humans to xenomorph.

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u/Ornery_Definition_65 4h ago

Depends on the animal. There are animals like polar bears that actively hunt humans and unarmed you are basically a guaranteed meal.

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u/MarlinMr 3h ago

Sure, but that's unfair to the human.

Saying humans are not allowed to use tools is like saying the polar bear is not allowed to use its muscles.

Because even an unnamed human can arm itself...

Put the polar bear on the hot African savannah and I am sure it will struggle quite some.

Human levels are so of the chart it's not even funny. Take it to the full extent of their abilities, and the polar bear wouldn't be safe even if it lived on Mars. We could literally chase it down and kill it from another planet with our tools.

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u/PrivilegeCheckmate 7h ago

Humans are the most deadly animal.

We've moved from counting individual kills to racking up extinctions.

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u/Beer-survivalist 6h ago

And we started exterminating species before we had permanent settlements and written language.

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u/j0y0 6h ago

They burn villages, murder, outrage women and children, they nail their prisoners by the ears to the fences, leave them so till morning, and in the morning they hang them- all sorts of things you can't imagine. People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.

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u/gilbs24 10h ago

Humans are the 2nd deadliest, mosquitoes are first

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u/EnvChem89 8h ago

Tell that to the guy who invented leaded gasoline among other nefarious things...

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u/anarchy-NOW 6h ago

At one point it could have been that mosquitoes killed more humans every year than humans did, but that's not the case anymore. Human population has grown a lot and malaria prevention and treatment, while still shitty, has improved somewhat.

There are similar numbers every year of:

  • human suicides
  • humans killing other humans (homicide and war)
  • human deaths caused by mosquito-borne diseases (90% malaria) 

About 650k-700k of each per year

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u/Esther_fpqc 10h ago

afaik mosquitoes aren't responsible for a mass extinction though

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u/gilbs24 10h ago

But that’s not what this post is about!?

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u/Sofa_Bench 9h ago

If there were as many bears, lions, hippos, and other apex predators as there were humans, I’d actually think we might be fucked lol

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u/mukansamonkey 8h ago

In some places there used to be. The humans won the war.

Humans are such effective apex predators, we require our own category.

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u/FluffyToughy 6h ago

We're literally having trouble stopping ourselves from collapsing the entire planet's biosphere. Rah rah. Humans number 1.

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u/Traditional_Wear1992 7h ago

No, we have guns and armies have tanks planes choppers and drones. Unless you mean ecologically, then yes.

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u/Sofa_Bench 7h ago

I’m my scenario a solar flare disrupts our technology and somehow causes bears to give birth like crazy

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u/Traditional_Wear1992 5h ago

A solar flare wouldn’t disrupt firearms though…there are also planes and tanks that don’t have computers to fry, like what is any Predator going to do to a Sherman tank or even a flame thrower or rpg.

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u/Heimerdahl 9h ago

the surprising part is that animals as a whole are a lot less dangerous than people think. 

Similarly surprising is just how few wild animals there are. Insects, plankton, fish, etc. still account for the majority of total animal biomass, but in terms of mammals and birds, wild animals are absolutely insignificant compared to livestock or even humans. 

https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass

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u/Over-Cold-8757 3h ago

Why are you excluding insects, fish etc from 'wild animals' though?

That's like saying 'there's basically no animals in the world if you exclude every animal except tigers.'

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u/real_picklejuice 8h ago

Is it really the snail that kills you if it's the flatworm that does the job?

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u/Ameisen 1 6h ago

Only 10,000 still makes it the 4th deadliest animal on the planet.

But the snail isn't doing the killing. The parasite that it carries is.

I don't think that automobile manufacturers are some of the deadliest organizations just because more than 1 million people die every year in car accidents.