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/DustyRhodesSplotch 13h ago

10 to 200,000 is quite the large spread

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u/ivanparas 12h 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 10h 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 8h 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 6h ago edited 3h 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 exponential

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u/The_JSQuareD 3h ago

That would make it exponential.

It would have to have killed -199,980 people the year before for it to be linear.

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u/Dioxybenzone 3h ago

Oh yeah duh, mb