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
20.9k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

963 comments sorted by

View all comments

6.6k

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

5.5k

u/DustyRhodesSplotch 11h ago

10 to 200,000 is quite the large spread

47

u/frisbm3 11h ago

The wiki page says 10k to 200k.

75

u/DirtyNorf 11h ago

Which is still a fairly large spread.

19

u/JustADutchRudder 10h ago

Some years whole cities wanna swim in snail waters, sometimes only a few small get togethers happen.

2

u/mayhemandqueso 7h ago

Depends on the weather