I had an encounter with
Gympie-Gympie/Stinging bush (Dendrocnide moroides) in the early 1980s when I was camping for some weeks at Emmagen Creek, Cape Tribulation which is about 50 miles north of Cairns and past Mossman in Queensland's Daintree rainforest. (Back then, Mossman was a single street with none of the modern luxurious tourist hotels/accommodation that it has today and Emmagen Creek was just cane toad infested wilderness.)
To say the stings were painful would be gross understatement (it's not something one ever forgets)! Nevertheless I was lucky as my encounter could have been much, much worse if it had not been for a quick-thinking local who grabbed me by the belt and pulled me back as we were tracking through some thick undergrowth (he saw it before me but not quite quickly enough).
Also, I'd been forewarned about Gympie-Gympie and another nasty native which is aptly known as Lawyer Cane/Vine or Wait-A-While (Calamus muelleri) — once you're in its 'claws', needle-like hooks, you definitely wait—you're not going anywhere quickly (extracting oneself is a long and painful process).
Being forewarned doesn't help much if one's only description of these hazards is verbal, one needs a picture as both are hard to see in the thick scrub and undergrowth and much of it looks pretty much the same (both are easily disguised amongst other greenery).
Fortunately the Gympie-Gympie only got me on the back of one hand. I was also lucky in another respect in that the local advised me to wear long pants and a long-sleeved shirt before we started out on that treck. (As it's so hot and humid in the Daintree such attire wasn't the usual norm, but getting around shirtless and in shorts is.)
Back at base, much time was spent with the medical kit tweezers extracting the essentially invisible hair-like threads that had embedded themselves into my skin. I recall some lidocaine-based sunburn cream helped but my hand was sore for ages afterwards.
> I was also lucky in another respect in that the local advised me to wear long pants and a long-sleeved shirt
Just based on Australia's reputation alone I don't think I would ever even think about venturing outside in anything short of a hazmat suit on top of a suit of plate mail :-)
Ages ago, I got a similar reaction (and also the exact opposite) when I posted my encounters with these critters (can't remember if on HN or elsewhere):
One of my staff had lots of Atrax robustus in his backyard and over a period he brought several to work and they became the Electronics Department's 'pet' (but we only kept one at a time).
We put him (with A. robustus the males are more deadly and agressive than the females) in a large empty coffee jar with rocks and dirt filling about a third the jar and with air holes in the lid which were just big enough to fit a pencil through. We kept him fed on slaters (woodlice) and crickets and he took pride of place on my office desk. Typically, they'd live for 18 months to two years.
They were talking points for visitors to my office (some were horried but most just curious). When I'd come in of a morning and switch the lights on he'd rear up on his hind legs with fangs thrust out. I'd occasionally respond by sticking one of those red 'Copperplate' pencils though an air hole and he'd attack it. The venom could be clearly seen running down the outside of the pencil. I kept that badly pocked-marked pencil as a souvenir for some years but unfortunately I've since lost it.
Also, I was 'lucky' enough to have the organization's union rep as one of my staff. Often, he'd come into my office for a discussion and he'd jokingly
preface our convention to the effect 'We expect your cooperation in this matter or we'll let him loose when you're not looking.'
For some reason, that post horrified several UK readers.
Ha! I don't want mislead you, in that I'm also a 'local' albeit from several thousand kilometers south of Cape Tribulation (Australia is a very big place). Thus, I'm familiar with much of the flora and fauna that seems to terrify people from other parts of the world (it's just that this was my first visit to these parts).
The Emmagen Creek 'local' was someone who I already knew, he used to work for me in electronics but chucked it in to 'go bush' with his better half and ended up taking over a disused tin-mining lease under the pretext of prospecting for tin but in reality he did little other than to loll around eating papaya which grew everywhere around his dwelling.
Somehow or other he invited me and another colleague to visit him and we agreed although it was very inconvenient for me at the time. (I had university assignments to complete—so when not trekking about in the bush you can picture me doing formal logic assignments sitting on a stump in that wilderness. Getting the assignments back to the uni in a timely manner was a somewhat fickle hit-and-miss process—I had to pay the local hippies who lived on the beach some miles away rather handsomely to take them to Cairns to post whenever they went there to collect their dole payments.)
Australia isn't really that bad, not that many of us fall victim to or are gobbled up by the wildlife every year but it does happen. We locals are rather blasé about wandering in the 'bush' without much protection—hazmat suits would be deemed totally unnecessary. Though the Daintree Rainforest probably has more to be concerned about than many other areas, there are crocodiles in the larger rivers and you'd be advised not to swim in them, also the cassowarys can be quite aggressive, especially so when nesting (see heading 'Attacks'): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassowary.
I got a bit of a scare myself when at Cape Tribulation. Emmagen Creek is just that, a small permanently-flowing creek with a few good swimming holes about two minutes walk from where we were camping. As was my wont, first thing of a morning I'd go to the creek to wash up and bush my teeth at its bank. One morning I sensed the presence of something nearby and to my right less than 18" away was a yellow-bellied black snake of a type I wasn't familiar with (like those I know from down south). Like me, it was hanging from bank and drinking the water (it seemed totally obvious to my presence). No worries, one keeps
perfectly still in those situations. When it finished drinking it just slid away.
Oh, that wasn't as nearly scary as when I accidentally stood on one of these critters close to where I lived as a kid (it was sunning itself on a bush path just around a bend that I couldn't see around): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_brown_snake.
This is one truly nasty bugger that one doesn't want to mess with. I felt this squish under my foot, fortunately it took of at great speed in one direction and I did the fastest back-flip of my life in the opposite direction.
See, there are hazards here, but one usually survives.
You don't know what "innate reflexes" are until you encounter one of these bastards, or a Tiger Snake (what we had in Tassie).
Something significantly lower down the brain stem kicks in and you react before your conscious brain even realises what's going on.
It's actually kinda fascinating to experience because you can tell our fear of snakes isn't something "learned"... It's baked into the hardware by evolution somewhere down in that pre-human part of the brain.
You're right, our fear of snakes is baked in the hardware, I'm certain of that, it's an evolved recognition of danger that likely goes back millions of years. That's why my innate reflexes automatically kicked into action when I stood on the Eastern Brown.
I don't think I've ever moved so fast in my life. I was 14 at the time so I was light, fit and agile. That said, my reaction time would likely have been slower than the snake if it had decided to strike. That was decades ago before decent antivenin and I was a reasonable distance from medical help and also I was by myself (trekking in the Blue Mountains by oneself at any age is stupid thing to do, so I was very lucky).
With my snake encounter at Emmagen Creek things were a little different, I was older about 30 and I'd learned the worst thing to do was to startle the snake so one should keep perfectly still—and I did although it was difficult.
I still wonder about that encounter, the snake definitely† wasn't there when I arrived at the Creek's bank so I was moving about and making noise. Most snakes I've encountered whilst bushwalking I've seen at a distance—2, 3 metres away—and they quickly scurry off but this one came awfully close whilst I was moving around and it showed no sign of aggression or seemingly any concern for my presence.
† My grandmother came from outback NSW and was bush and snake wise so I was taught from a very early age to always keep an eye out for them whilst wandering through the bush and I did so at Emmagen Creek as I do when bushwalking anywhere. The fact is the snake arrived after me and I find that strange.
I remember once as a kid I was in my room playing Xbox... Finished a mission in Halo and got up to walk out of my room only to be greeted by that lovely pitch-black, yet eerily shiney colour of a Tiger Snake just sitting in the doorway looking at me.
I'm confident that, to this day, it's the most terror I've ever felt...
Like you said, I just froze... Slowly walked backwards to give it space... Then it just turned around and fucked off back outside.
Needless to say, I was very careful about keeping all doors to the house closed from that point forward.
Multiple deaths per year in Australia from honeybee stings. Box jellyfish average less than one per year. Conflicting sources put bees (or bees and wasps together) at just behind, on par with, or ahead of venomous snakes in terms of mean annual deaths in Australia.
When I have an encounter with a potentially deadly animal, I don't care about the absolute number of deaths its species have created. I care about the percentage for 1 encounter.
Agreed, there's a big difference between "what is most likely to kill me" and "what is most likely to kill me if I encounter one." However, given that honeybees are so high up there, the average Australian must encounter them a whole lot more than these other animals.
> "We show here that the venoms of Australian Dendrocnide species contain heretofore unknown pain-inducing peptides that potently activate mouse sensory neurons and delay inactivation of voltage-gated sodium channels. These neurotoxins localize specifically to the stinging hairs and are miniproteins of 4 kDa, whose 3D structure is stabilized in an inhibitory cystine knot motif, a characteristic shared with neurotoxins found in spider and cone snail venoms."
It's remarkably stable: 100-yr old dried botanical specimens can still sting. This research is pretty difficult as the individual stinging hairs produce only tiny volumes of liquid, requiring the use of sensitive mass spectrometry techniques.
Thanks very much for that most interesting reference. (I'm sure I'd have seen it earlier if I'd not let my sub to Science expire.)
"These irritation-inducing molecules include histamine, acetylcholine, 5-hydroxytryptamine as well as formic acid and other low–molecular weight organic acids."
Having been stung by bull-ants and like brethren, I can attest that as bad and as painful as these formic acid/concoction-type stings were they pail against what I experienced from Gympie-Gympie.
"…none of these small molecules in the volar forearm of humans was entirely sufficient to reproduce the symptoms of a Dendrocnide sting,"
That is also fully consistent with my experience.
What I find so interesting about this paper (in addition to my interest through experience), is that these are newly discovered toxins which seems somewhat strange given the ubiquity of Gympie-Gympie and its well-known ability to inflict excruciating pain.
Presumably, this discovery will spur on further toxins research.
I wonder if you could whip up a vaccine to generate antibodies against a part of the protein so that it can’t bind to the right places on the sensory neurons.
Or heck maybe skip the vaccine and create some monoclonals against it. Although my understanding is that creating monoclonals usually requires isolating B cells targeting the right epitope from someone and sequencing them so some unlucky donor human or animal would need to touch the plant first.
Won't be long for this to be weaponized. Being able to chemically turn it on and off sounds like a "perfect" torture device that doesn't leave forensic evidence behind.
We have the same urban legend in the US about poison ivy, but I actually knew a kid who made the mistake.
Poison ivy is certainly nowhere near this description of gympie-gympie, but the persistent itch is certainly unrelenting enough to cause pretty severe distress. I got a small touch of it on my forearm one time. Didn't even know I had brushed up against the plant, so I didn't perform the recommended clean up. Just from absent mindedly scratching, I ended up spreading the oil over almost my entire forearm and onto my leg. I barely slept for two weeks.
I got one worse for you. The home that I lived in when I was 16 years old had a chain link fence in the backyard that was covered in poison ivy. I got the bright idea do douse some of it in gasoline and light it on fire to get rid of it.
Bad idea.
The smoke carries the oils and if you get in it, you're going to be in for a bad time.
A friend attacked a patch of undergrowth with a string trimmer (“weed eater”). She was wearing shorts and the pulped fragments of poison ivy splattered all over her legs and arms. Imagine putting poison ivy in a blender, then pouring it on yourself.
I knew someone who went hiking in Northern California. He was having problems with hay fever and his eyes were very itchy so he grabbed a leaf and rubbed it on his eyes. It felt good initially but then began itching and burning and his eyelids swelled up so he couldn’t see. It turns out he had grabbed poison oak leaves (a relative of poison ivy) and rubbed them on his eyes. It was not a fun time.
I knew the local fauna in Oz was composed of a hundred different death machines, but I never thought about the fact that the flora could also be scary.
Eh I mean the US has its fair share of snakes and spiders, crocs/gators, plus bears, coyotes, and other large animals which Australia doesn't have which are far more scary than any insect IMO. I guess the oceans are worse with sharks and box jellies, and some rivers have bull sharks. But Australia and the US have more in common wrt deadly flora and fauna than most would like to admit.
Stories like this make me wonder why anyone lives in Australia, since virtually everything seems to want to kill you. Or perhaps Aussies are tougher than the rest of us.
I love Terry Pratchett’s description of XXXX - the Australian analogue in his book “The Last Continent”. While a book on deadly native animals would encompass several volumes, the “book” of safe animals was a single page that listed “some of the sheep.”
But also, these guys are like… A+ proof of dinosaur’s evolution into birds… you can pretty much picture Cassowaries in place of the raptors in Jurassic park…
annecdote: i once went for a job at edinburgh university zoology department (i would have been about 19 at the time), and was confronted with a mostly disected mess.
interviewer: what do you make of that?
me: it looks like a badly disected cassowary.
it was a cassowary (where from, who knows - they don't roam wild on arthur seat) and i didn't get the job (good).
It's often said, but really, the way it's reported in international media is very sensationalist; the things that are deadly are just not common in areas where people live and travel.
Yes, sure, we have some deadly snakes, spiders, crocodiles, a few plants like in the OP, etc. But so do many other countries/regions around the world, including the USA.
In practice, the vast majority of Australians never have any contact with them, and actual cases of people being killed or seriously harmed by these things are extremely rare, and are much less common than fatalities/serious injuries from traffic accidents, which also have quite low rates by international standards.
Australians like to think of themselves as tough, but, I dunno, we're pretty much like most other people around the world in my experience :)
Edit:
Some actual data:
There were 541 animal-related deaths reported to an Australian coroner between 2001 and 2017, with an average of 32 animal-related deaths reported per calendar year. Land mammals
comprised the majority (71.0%) of deaths, followed by reptiles and amphibians (10.7%) and insects and invertebrates (8.7%).
...
Nearly one third (31.8%) of animal-related deaths involved horses.
Worth pointing out that short of brown bears and wolves, the stuff we have in the US is pretty tame.
Going from memory, feel free to correct:
- Tons of snakes that will ruin your day (and probably week/month), but most of them have high survival rates and anti-venom. I was shocked to find they're often survivable without treatment? We're running out of anti-venom for coral snakes (interestingly they're basically cobras), but they're famously docile and have a weak bite.
- Two dangerous spiders, but both fairly treatable with medical attention. Though brown recluse bites that progress can be pretty scary
- Alligators are surprisingly non-dangerous, if not fed, or intentionally interacted with. They'll walk right past you, and want nothing to do with people
- Big cats aren't too common and tend to avoid people; but I guess they've been seeing a few more attacks out west
So it's mostly just bears. Actually, contrary to popular knowledge, black bears kill quite a few people. They can become predatory. Brown bears are obviously scary. I think it's also a myth that you should always play dead... you have to really understand bear behavior to know what to do.
Australia has crocs that seriously hunt people, and fight them over territory. Plus snakes that are super deadly. I guess almost all venomous spiders are less of a big deal than I was lead to believe growing up and usually not fatal, even without medical attention... but you wouldn't want to get bit by a funnel web.
It's true that most Aussies live in southern states and have never experienced dangerous animals.
However, people living in north QLD, NT and WA are definitely in nature's territory. Crocodiles are now inhabiting almost every waterway, dry conditions make taipan snakes and spiders a real threat, and the rainforest really does has dangerous plants and animals. As an FNQ resident, most locals no longer swim at the beaches.
I think your perspective depends on where you live.
I wasn’t/am not disputing that, just going on the data that indicates that even in those states, fatalities and severe harms are still relatively rare, compared with other causes. But yes, I fully accept that people living in parts of those states/territories (and others too) need to be more careful. I’ve visited FNQ several times and certainly don’t swim in the sea, at least without nets, or full body protection when snorkeling at the Reef.
Actually, I'd wager that the most dangerous animals in north america are deer and dogs. Deer because they are constantly walking in front of cars and dogs because they're everywhere and bite people. The deer / car encounters can be quite lethal while the dog bite situation is typically not lethal but as with any serious injury can be quite life altering.
…but American dogs are everywhere locked inside peoples homes and mostly trained or bred to be docile. Dogs in America are absolutely not a risk.
America doesn’t have wild dogs. America doesn’t have a biting dog problem. There were 27 dog related deaths last year. Considering how many dogs exist, that’s nothing. People sleep in bed with their dogs, people let their dogs play with infants.
Wild boar are apparently pretty scary too. Read about a dad and his kids playing in their yard being suddenly surrounded by thick angry combat pigs (borrowing the cassowary nickname from another post).
I grew up in the south and it's definitely legendary, but my sense is more that it's everywhere but more annoying than devastating. It needs a ton of sunlight which limits it some, but also means it grows along the edges of forests by roads, where it's extremely visible. Gives the impression that it's taking over everything but at least when I still lived there it wasn't. It is certainly out of control though, in the sense of like, we couldn't stop it even if we really wanted to.
I've cleared a couple patches of it a long time ago, it takes persistence but isn't as bad as some other plants in the end. Letting a goat have a go at it a few times a year will end it in a couple seasons.
The problem with stats on animal related deaths in Australia is they never count the 80,000 or so a year that die from a massive heart attack when they see a huntsman.
At least the snakes are mostly kind enough to fuck off to where the humans don't live.
Is it any better in the US where corporations, cars, trucks, alligators, wolves, bears, rattlesnakes, and most of all other people all want to kill you?
Rattlesnakes are rarely deadly unless you get bit in a vulnerable part and can't get medical attention. About 10-15 people die a year from rattlesnakes. Bears kill about 50 people a year, cougars rarely kill anyone (something like 27 in 100 years). Gators while terrifying have only killed 26 people in over 70 years.
Cars and humans are far worse.
The thing about Australia's flora and fauna is that Australia has such a low population density. I think that if it matched the US, far more people would die from it's creepy animals etc.
my little nephew went to australia for a year, travelling and working. my poor (late) mother was on the edge of her seat the whole time, convinced that he was going to be bitten, stung, dehydrated etc. we used to (perhaps unforgivably) tease her by showing her david attenborough sort of films featuring box jellyfishes.
Even the plants are trying to kill you in Australia. That continent seems to have a bonanza of deadly critters.
Still, when you look at the statistics, any urban area in the U.S. is more dangerous than Australian wildlife. Both the roads and the people.
Edit: downvoter doesn’t grok math
You are not only more likely to be attacked by a human in New York than the wildlife in Australia, you’re more likely to be bitten by a New Yorker than a critter in Oz.
Geezer reaction: At some point, stories like this became a blur of "there actually is a Real World out there, and Bad Things can happen to you there, and you can't just drink a Health Potion or Respawn at your last Save Point to get out of it!".
(Admitting that such stories probably do help educate the kiddies, the noobs, etc.)
I had a chunk of bull-nettle[1] land on my forearm in college. That spot occasionally flared up and again became painful for several decades afterwards...
I did not fall, but collecting insects once in the rainforest I brushed my pant-leg against this. Couldn't understand the pain. Was dumb and naive to not read the local park brochure when we came in, only when we left after the first day of work. When I went back to collect the traps I realized I had placed them all along a huge fallen tree, with this plant running right beside it. I was incredibly lucky. Stung for around 4 days IIRC, and this was super minor contact from what I could tell. I had been hyper aware of snakes etc., and well covered for other biting insects, but my "adventure" pants seemed just a little too thin for coverage.
While we do like to play up the fact Australia has a variety of venomous animals, it is true that very few people fall prey to them. Horses and cattle are actually the most dangerous by raw number of deaths caused - more interaction equals more opportunity.
The platypus is one of the most interesting ones, being a mammal that lays eggs. The males have venomous spurs on their hind legs. That said, there are no recorded deaths from a platypus sting.
In 2019, some newly erects signs on a freeway in Melbourne came down in high winds due to some defective bolts. There was even some dramatic dash-cam footage of a car being crushed. Fortunately no one was killed, but it did generate the quip that in Australia, even the road signs are trying to kill you.
yup, the needles contain the poison and the poison doesn't break down or deteriorate. Given that only a super small amount of poison is required to induce pain, the needles and poison can conceivably outlive the "host"
> After investigation, Hurley found several culprits, including beetles, other insects, and red-legged pademelons, a type of small marsupial.
I was going to ask. I remember an old woman in my childhood, someone in the extended family, she could take nettles and crush them in her hands and felt nothing. I'm not sure but it may have been partly due to handling them to make soup and whatnot in those days.
So I was just thinking... there's gotta be a way to become immune.
Couldn´t some kind of lasers/radio break down the hairs?
I snack on nettles, there's a trick to it. The needles only grow on the underside of the leaves. If you handle them with care you can pluck the leaves barehanded, roll 'em in a ball and chew.
After being cut and dying, nettle needles become soft. This is not the case with gympie-gympie as their needles remain hard and painful even after a long time.
Reminds me of devil's club (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil's_club ). I touched some in alaska and it was intensely painful then my skin sloughed off and I have a scar (unpigmented skin) some 30 years later.
I was born here and have lived a fairly good time so far... hell I've even played paintball in the bush. you learn to pay attention to your surroundings pretty quick :-)
To say the stings were painful would be gross understatement (it's not something one ever forgets)! Nevertheless I was lucky as my encounter could have been much, much worse if it had not been for a quick-thinking local who grabbed me by the belt and pulled me back as we were tracking through some thick undergrowth (he saw it before me but not quite quickly enough).
Also, I'd been forewarned about Gympie-Gympie and another nasty native which is aptly known as Lawyer Cane/Vine or Wait-A-While (Calamus muelleri) — once you're in its 'claws', needle-like hooks, you definitely wait—you're not going anywhere quickly (extracting oneself is a long and painful process).
Being forewarned doesn't help much if one's only description of these hazards is verbal, one needs a picture as both are hard to see in the thick scrub and undergrowth and much of it looks pretty much the same (both are easily disguised amongst other greenery).
Fortunately the Gympie-Gympie only got me on the back of one hand. I was also lucky in another respect in that the local advised me to wear long pants and a long-sleeved shirt before we started out on that treck. (As it's so hot and humid in the Daintree such attire wasn't the usual norm, but getting around shirtless and in shorts is.)
Back at base, much time was spent with the medical kit tweezers extracting the essentially invisible hair-like threads that had embedded themselves into my skin. I recall some lidocaine-based sunburn cream helped but my hand was sore for ages afterwards.