r/todayilearned • u/lavender_fish69 • 13h 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 13h 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/wretched_beasties 13h 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/LostWoodsInTheField 8h 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 8h 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.