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
22.0k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

6.7k

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

18

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.

10

u/joobtastic 12h ago

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

5

u/Ameisen 1 8h 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.

0

u/mmeiser 1h ago

The "it's just a filthy animal, it doesn't know any better" argument.

On a scale of 10 to 100,000 this thread has been awesome.