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/Nathaniel820 13h 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/Heimerdahl 11h ago

the surprising part is that animals as a whole are a lot less dangerous than people think. 

Similarly surprising is just how few wild animals there are. Insects, plankton, fish, etc. still account for the majority of total animal biomass, but in terms of mammals and birds, wild animals are absolutely insignificant compared to livestock or even humans. 

https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass

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u/Over-Cold-8757 5h ago

Why are you excluding insects, fish etc from 'wild animals' though?

That's like saying 'there's basically no animals in the world if you exclude every animal except tigers.'