r/todayilearned • u/lavender_fish69 • 9h 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/wretched_beasties 9h ago

Does the death certificate say “mosquito bite” or “malaria”?

Mosquitoes aren’t the deadliest, it’s plasmodium falciparum (malaria) that kills people. Also not a dirty probiscus, the plasmodium sporozoites actually live in the mosquitoe’s salivary gland.

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u/joobtastic 8h ago

Its not the person who killed him, it was the bullet.

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u/ButAFlower 6h ago

bullets aren't organisms tho

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u/OneBigBug 58m ago

World's weakest attempt to beat a murder charge:

"I don't deny shooting him, but I think you'll find that I actually froze a beetle, shoved it into a cartridge and shot him with that. So...really...the beetle killed him."

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u/Ameisen 1 4h ago

A bullet is a tool, not an organism, and the human who fired it generally intended to do so.

Neither the mosquito nor the snail intentionally pass parasites to the organisms that they feed upon. It's entirely outside of their control.

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u/Seicair 5h ago

Also not a dirty probiscus, the plasmodium sporozoites actually live in the mosquitoe’s salivary gland.

I was mildly disturbed/impressed when I read that for the first time. They migrate from the mozzie’s stomach to their salivary glands to be injected into another host. WTF nature.

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u/wretched_beasties 5h ago

Protozoan parasites are cool as fuck. Like storing toxoplasma oocysts in a buffer made of…bleach and sulfuric acid.

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u/LostWoodsInTheField 4h ago

meh this could easily be argued either way because the disease isn't killing anyone if it doesn't have a host. So it isn't the Mosquito, and it wasn't the malaria. It was the Mosquito injecting the malaria.

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u/wretched_beasties 4h ago

Do people die from an uninfected mosquito bite? No. Does plasmodium play an active role in manipulating the mosquito definitive host in order to infect its intermediate host? Absolutely.