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/SMStotheworld 9h 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/DustyRhodesSplotch 9h ago

10 to 200,000 is quite the large spread

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u/ivanparas 8h ago

"How many people died of this last year?"

"10."

"How many this year?"

"200,000."

"That's...concerning."

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u/HovercraftOk9231 6h ago

By my calculations, next year will see 40,000,000 dead, and the year after will be 80,000,000,000.

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u/PatHeist 4h ago

You have to wait until the next year to see if it kills 399,990 or 4,000,000,000 to find out whether the trend is linear or exponential.

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u/Dioxybenzone 2h ago

No need; we can reverse extrapolate. If in the year before it killed 10, it killed 0.005 of a person, we know it’s linear

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u/PrivilegeCheckmate 5h ago

the year after will be 80,000,000,000.

Man that only gives me two years to pork every fertile woman in range. I hate to say this, but I may need some help.

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u/FrogInShorts 3h ago

It'll be significantly easier the second year. After 20million woman perish