7 ms·

This is super cool, if a bit scary. Man Australia has it all though, 8/10 of the deadliest spiders, half the deadliest snakes, crocodiles, rockfish, and now fir

This is super cool, if a bit scary. Man Australia has it all though, 8/10 of the deadliest spiders, half the deadliest snakes, crocodiles, rockfish, and now firebirds. Inhabiting Australia is a testament to man's arrogance.

jacques_chester 9y ago
> Inhabiting Australia is a testament to man's arrogance. Given that humans inhabited Australia for at least 40,000 years without the benefits of domesticable crops or herd animals, I'd say it's a testament to incredible perseverance.
electric_sheep 9y ago
Haha, this has been a well-trod rant of mine for years. Don't forget scorpions, vampire bats, great white sharks, and the world's top 4 deadliest jellyfish!
- jacques_chester 9y ago
  I grew up in Darwin and lived to tell the tale. It's really very simple. Here is a diagram: [place where bad things are] [me] So long as I am not doing something dumb like going near an estuarine river filled with invisible deathbeasts, or getting into an ocean filled with transparently-tentacled murder-squigglies, or stomping through grass near logs with dozing fangjectors, I will be fine. It's just not difficult.
  - rplnt 9y ago
    Your diagram got me a bit confused as the empty space was right over the fold and I was wondering why the comments wouldn't load and what a weird error [place where bad things are] is.
  - a3n 9y ago
    It's seems likely that people growing up in a place called Darwin would, in time, evolve a particular fitness to thrive.
    - jacques_chester 9y ago
      I love it. Its only rival in my heart is New York.
  - phillc73 9y ago
    One doesn't have to be "dumb" to be in some danger from the fangjectors. A friend of mine was driving around his property and found the track blocked by a fallen tree. He started pulling branches off the road and trod on a tiger snake in the grass. He was bitten and survived after administration of anti-venom. He wasn't doing anything particularly dumb and probably 99.9% of the time wouldn't have trodden on a snake. I used to work on a farm. One day after moving the irrigation sprays I went to the well to turn the pump on. Around the well was about a 3 foot high concrete wall, maybe 3 inches wide. I sat on the edge of the wall to wait until the pressure came up and sprays started working. As I turned to leave I happened to notice on the wall, about 30cm from my hand, was a red-bellied black snake sunning itself. Close call. I remember as a child, my mother chasing brown snakes out of our front garden so they wouldn't be a danger to us children. If you're outside of a major urban environment in Australia, snakes are around. One just needs to be a bit careful.
- mmjaa 9y ago
  On the flip side of this incessantly boring argument, once you've actually dealt with a swarm of all of these things successfully, i.e. lived to make lunch out of it, then .. pretty much .. everyone elses' zeitgeist seems pretty fucking boring. The dangers in life are what make it interesting to think about, right at the end of it all...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mmjaa 9y ago
As a native-born Australian, your last sentence really resonates with me. I was lucky to have been born there, and raised a bit, but when I was old enough to have a religious-like experience out there in the north-western deserts, I realised I couldn't ever feel comfortable for as long as I, a privileged white boy, lived on the Australian continent. So, I left. 30 years later, I'm taking my kids back for a bit of tourism. And for sure, we'll be keeping an eye out, back up on those long stretches, for the odd kite or two .. not that there's much to burn where we're going. Australia is a huge, and most awesome place in the world. It's a pity what its current humans are doing with it.
- esaym 9y ago
  I guess I don't know much about Australia. Why were you no longer comfortable there and what are humans doing to it??
  - mmjaa 9y ago
    I love the land, but I have no interest in Australian culture or politics. I think its a real pity that, as guardians of one of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet, Australians have let it fall into serious disrepair. See, for example, what has happened to the Great Barrier Reef. I learned to travel at a very young age, and don't have any national identity worth defending. I think of Australia as a wonderful country; pity about the people. Its no fun going back there every few years and seeing the landscape covered in copy-paste strip malls from Arizona ...
    - phillc73 9y ago
      I left Australia 17 years ago, for what seems like similar reasons, although I have a hard time articulating them. Perhaps in another 13 years..... However, as time passes, my views are starting to change somewhat. There is a large enough body of literature to lead me to believe that there are more progressive elements of Australian society, that I was not broadly exposed to previously. Perhaps this realisation has come in time, through maturity, and I am also seeking it out more. I'm currently reading Reynold's The Other Side of the Frontier[1], a ground breaking work from 1981. Other publications like The Monthly[2] are also worth reading (Noel Pearson's essay this month particularly so). The more I seek out such alternative views, the more I'm convinced there is a large enough minority who do give a damn and that positive change is still possible. If I was to return on a permanent basis, which seems ever more difficult as I'm seriously embedded in my current European location now, I'm quite sure I will not live in a major metropolitan location like Sydney or Melbourne. I'm thinking now more like Tasmania, maybe Adelaide region or even far north Queensland. Somewhere the white noise of boganism may not have penetrated quite so deeply. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Side_of_the_Frontier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Side_of_the_Frontier [2] https://www.themonthly.com.au/ https://www.themonthly.com.au/
kaybe 9y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if all of these killed less humans or even creatures than the humans (and their cars) combined.
toyg 9y ago
Meh. Thanks to the technological and cultural advancements of the Afro-Euro-Asian human cluster, we could wipe 99% of these “threats” tomorrow if we wanted to. In fact, we did have comparable dangers in other continents in the past - we just had no qualms with killing every single one of them or burning their ecosystem to the ground, because we had no concept of “ecosystem”: everything in nature was a threat to be dealt with, and that was that. Back in the day, you could be attacked by rabid wolves while sitting in your garden! So we killed them, we hunted them down systematically until they were no longer a threat. We had terrible insects, killing and spreading diseases! So we removed all swamps and invented chemicals to massacre them. Etc etc. Australia, for geographical reasons, simply started the process too late, when we were already getting cold feet. Now that we understand how Nature works a bit more, it’s become difficult to justify large-scale efforts to remove these threats to human life. We find it more acceptable to suffer a potential spider bite here and there, than to risk irreparable losses to the variety of life and the quality of our planet’s natural state. If anything, the fact that Australia manages to slowly expand human footprint while still maintaining a balanced truce with our predators, is testament to the level of emotional maturity that our animal race has reached.
- FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
  >Thanks to the technological and cultural advancements of the Afro-Euro-Asian human cluster, we could wipe 99% of these “threats” tomorrow if we wanted to. We can be wiped out by some of the simplest lifeforms, and even simpler, not quite lifeforms on the planet.
  - toyg 9y ago
    > We can be wiped out by some of the simplest lifeforms And yet, we are not.
    - dukeflukem 9y ago
      Yes hell never win that "wiped out" argument!
  - 9y ago
crispinb 9y ago
Hmm. The dangerous animals (say the stats) are humans, horses and dogs (in that order). None are particularly special to Australia, though Homo Sapiens Boganus is a unique local variation (often spotted Queensland). The so-called 'deadly' animals (some of which, including a variety of snakes, I come across frequently where I live) barely rate a statistical mention.
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
  Hang on a minute. Just because more people die from humans, dogs and horses, doesn't mean that snakes, spiders and jellyfish (in Australia) are not dangerous. For instance, if you throw me in the sea next to a great white in a feeding frenzy, my chances of dying will have nothing to do with the probability of dying from a dog bite. The statistics for the probability of dying from specific causes can help predict what one is most likely to die from- but not to how likely one is to die from encountering a spider or a snake. In other words, people are afraid of, say, black widow spiders, because the probability of dying given one is attacked by a black widow is extremely high. And that is perfectly reasonable and a very good statistic to keep in mind if one is in any situation where encountering a black widow is a possibility (even one with a small probability).
  - crispinb 9y ago
    True, but I wasn't advocating doing silly things with dangerous animals. I was replying to a comment suggesting that their presence indicates that .. > Inhabiting Australia is a testament to man's arrogance .. whereas the stats indicate that the dangers in practice are minimal, and the measures to obviate them are largely obvious, easy to implement and almost universally observed. Rare's the week I won't come across a brown snake or redback. Never's the week that either is the most significant danger I face.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
      OK, fair point. What are the most significant dangers you face, if I may pry? What's worse than snakes and spiders on a weekly basis?

jacques_chester 9y ago

> Inhabiting Australia is a testament to man's arrogance. Given that humans inhabited Australia for at least 40,000 years without the benefits of domesticable crops or herd animals, I'd say it's a testament to incredible perseverance.

electric_sheep 9y ago

Haha, this has been a well-trod rant of mine for years. Don't forget scorpions, vampire bats, great white sharks, and the world's top 4 deadliest jellyfish!

jacques_chester 9y ago
I grew up in Darwin and lived to tell the tale. It's really very simple. Here is a diagram: [place where bad things are] [me] So long as I am not doing something dumb like going near an estuarine river filled with invisible deathbeasts, or getting into an ocean filled with transparently-tentacled murder-squigglies, or stomping through grass near logs with dozing fangjectors, I will be fine. It's just not difficult.
- rplnt 9y ago
  Your diagram got me a bit confused as the empty space was right over the fold and I was wondering why the comments wouldn't load and what a weird error [place where bad things are] is.
- a3n 9y ago
  It's seems likely that people growing up in a place called Darwin would, in time, evolve a particular fitness to thrive.
  - jacques_chester 9y ago
    I love it. Its only rival in my heart is New York.
- phillc73 9y ago
  One doesn't have to be "dumb" to be in some danger from the fangjectors. A friend of mine was driving around his property and found the track blocked by a fallen tree. He started pulling branches off the road and trod on a tiger snake in the grass. He was bitten and survived after administration of anti-venom. He wasn't doing anything particularly dumb and probably 99.9% of the time wouldn't have trodden on a snake. I used to work on a farm. One day after moving the irrigation sprays I went to the well to turn the pump on. Around the well was about a 3 foot high concrete wall, maybe 3 inches wide. I sat on the edge of the wall to wait until the pressure came up and sprays started working. As I turned to leave I happened to notice on the wall, about 30cm from my hand, was a red-bellied black snake sunning itself. Close call. I remember as a child, my mother chasing brown snakes out of our front garden so they wouldn't be a danger to us children. If you're outside of a major urban environment in Australia, snakes are around. One just needs to be a bit careful.
mmjaa 9y ago
On the flip side of this incessantly boring argument, once you've actually dealt with a swarm of all of these things successfully, i.e. lived to make lunch out of it, then .. pretty much .. everyone elses' zeitgeist seems pretty fucking boring. The dangers in life are what make it interesting to think about, right at the end of it all...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mmjaa 9y ago

As a native-born Australian, your last sentence really resonates with me. I was lucky to have been born there, and raised a bit, but when I was old enough to have a religious-like experience out there in the north-western deserts, I realised I couldn't ever feel comfortable for as long as I, a privileged white boy, lived on the Australian continent. So, I left. 30 years later, I'm taking my kids back for a bit of tourism. And for sure, we'll be keeping an eye out, back up on those long stretches, for the odd kite or two .. not that there's much to burn where we're going. Australia is a huge, and most awesome place in the world. It's a pity what its current humans are doing with it.

esaym 9y ago
I guess I don't know much about Australia. Why were you no longer comfortable there and what are humans doing to it??
- mmjaa 9y ago
  I love the land, but I have no interest in Australian culture or politics. I think its a real pity that, as guardians of one of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet, Australians have let it fall into serious disrepair. See, for example, what has happened to the Great Barrier Reef. I learned to travel at a very young age, and don't have any national identity worth defending. I think of Australia as a wonderful country; pity about the people. Its no fun going back there every few years and seeing the landscape covered in copy-paste strip malls from Arizona ...
  - phillc73 9y ago
    I left Australia 17 years ago, for what seems like similar reasons, although I have a hard time articulating them. Perhaps in another 13 years..... However, as time passes, my views are starting to change somewhat. There is a large enough body of literature to lead me to believe that there are more progressive elements of Australian society, that I was not broadly exposed to previously. Perhaps this realisation has come in time, through maturity, and I am also seeking it out more. I'm currently reading Reynold's The Other Side of the Frontier[1], a ground breaking work from 1981. Other publications like The Monthly[2] are also worth reading (Noel Pearson's essay this month particularly so). The more I seek out such alternative views, the more I'm convinced there is a large enough minority who do give a damn and that positive change is still possible. If I was to return on a permanent basis, which seems ever more difficult as I'm seriously embedded in my current European location now, I'm quite sure I will not live in a major metropolitan location like Sydney or Melbourne. I'm thinking now more like Tasmania, maybe Adelaide region or even far north Queensland. Somewhere the white noise of boganism may not have penetrated quite so deeply. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Side_of_the_Frontier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Other_Side_of_the_Frontier [2] https://www.themonthly.com.au/ https://www.themonthly.com.au/

kaybe 9y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if all of these killed less humans or even creatures than the humans (and their cars) combined.

toyg 9y ago

Meh. Thanks to the technological and cultural advancements of the Afro-Euro-Asian human cluster, we could wipe 99% of these “threats” tomorrow if we wanted to. In fact, we did have comparable dangers in other continents in the past - we just had no qualms with killing every single one of them or burning their ecosystem to the ground, because we had no concept of “ecosystem”: everything in nature was a threat to be dealt with, and that was that. Back in the day, you could be attacked by rabid wolves while sitting in your garden! So we killed them, we hunted them down systematically until they were no longer a threat. We had terrible insects, killing and spreading diseases! So we removed all swamps and invented chemicals to massacre them. Etc etc. Australia, for geographical reasons, simply started the process too late, when we were already getting cold feet. Now that we understand how Nature works a bit more, it’s become difficult to justify large-scale efforts to remove these threats to human life. We find it more acceptable to suffer a potential spider bite here and there, than to risk irreparable losses to the variety of life and the quality of our planet’s natural state. If anything, the fact that Australia manages to slowly expand human footprint while still maintaining a balanced truce with our predators, is testament to the level of emotional maturity that our animal race has reached.

FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
>Thanks to the technological and cultural advancements of the Afro-Euro-Asian human cluster, we could wipe 99% of these “threats” tomorrow if we wanted to. We can be wiped out by some of the simplest lifeforms, and even simpler, not quite lifeforms on the planet.
- toyg 9y ago
  > We can be wiped out by some of the simplest lifeforms And yet, we are not.
  - dukeflukem 9y ago
    Yes hell never win that "wiped out" argument!
- 9y ago

crispinb 9y ago

Hmm. The dangerous animals (say the stats) are humans, horses and dogs (in that order). None are particularly special to Australia, though Homo Sapiens Boganus is a unique local variation (often spotted Queensland). The so-called 'deadly' animals (some of which, including a variety of snakes, I come across frequently where I live) barely rate a statistical mention.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
Hang on a minute. Just because more people die from humans, dogs and horses, doesn't mean that snakes, spiders and jellyfish (in Australia) are not dangerous. For instance, if you throw me in the sea next to a great white in a feeding frenzy, my chances of dying will have nothing to do with the probability of dying from a dog bite. The statistics for the probability of dying from specific causes can help predict what one is most likely to die from- but not to how likely one is to die from encountering a spider or a snake. In other words, people are afraid of, say, black widow spiders, because the probability of dying given one is attacked by a black widow is extremely high. And that is perfectly reasonable and a very good statistic to keep in mind if one is in any situation where encountering a black widow is a possibility (even one with a small probability).
- crispinb 9y ago
  True, but I wasn't advocating doing silly things with dangerous animals. I was replying to a comment suggesting that their presence indicates that .. > Inhabiting Australia is a testament to man's arrogance .. whereas the stats indicate that the dangers in practice are minimal, and the measures to obviate them are largely obvious, easy to implement and almost universally observed. Rare's the week I won't come across a brown snake or redback. Never's the week that either is the most significant danger I face.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
    OK, fair point. What are the most significant dangers you face, if I may pry? What's worse than snakes and spiders on a weekly basis?