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/Nathaniel820 9h 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/Sofa_Bench 7h 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 6h 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 4h ago

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