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What it’s like to fall into the deadly Australian plant, gympie-gympie
- bell-cot 4y agoGeezer 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.)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jonnycomputer 4y agoIt's rogue-like all the way down.
- AltruisticGapHN 4y ago> 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?
- deafpolygon 4y agoAfter 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.
- empyrrhicist 4y agoNettles hurt less when handled roughly. There's even a phrase about it: https://wordhistories.net/2019/01/28/grasp-nettle-origin/ https://wordhistories.net/2019/01/28/grasp-nettle-origin/
- foobarian 4y agoNettles don't really hurt on the palms of your hands. Nettles are also kinda not in the same club, after all we eat them. They taste like spinach.
- klyrs 4y agoI 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.
- coldcode 4y agoStories 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.
- llamaLord 4y agoTo be fair... There are at least... 3... Animals here that aren't explicitly trying to kill us. It's really not that bad. Just don't go into the warm water or the box jellyfish will get you. Keep an eye out for Sting-rays too... Nobody wants to go out like old-mate Steve. Oh and don't go into the cold water either, blue-ringed octopus... Nasty buggers. Rivers too... Not a great idea... Crocks are pretty nippy when they're hungry. Creeks are pretty safe... Except for those duck-billed, beaver looking mother-fuckers with their poisonous spurs everywhere... (platypus). Best to avoid the dessert too... Taipan's are pretty nasty. Oh and the fire ants... Come to think of it, the bush has Tiger Snakes... Probably should avoid that too... Just stay at home... ... Oh... And keep an eye out for the spiders... They really like being indoors where you sleep... Will also kill you... The main thing to remember though... The true threat... Our sworn enemy for all eternity... Our nations true oppressors... Those fucking Emus.
- ndsipa_pomu 4y agoYou missed out the deadly drop-bears
- llamaLord 4y agoAnd the Combat-Emu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassowary https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassowary
- techdragon 4y agonever heard it called a combat emu… 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… Some extra Cassowary info. https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/wildlife/2019/10/jungle-royalty-the-enigmatic-cassowary/ https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/topics/wildlife/2019... https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/how-dangerous-are-cassowaries-really/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/how-da...
- llamaLord 4y agoThere's an urban legend in Australia about a bloke that went camping once, had to take a shit in the bush, and didn't have any dunny-role. Poor guy grabbed a handful of Gympie-gympie that was on the ground next to him and proceeded to wipe his ass with it. Legend says he ended up topping himself a few hours later to escape the pain. Whether it's true or not... Fuck only knows. We do like making shit up... Especially when it makes Yanks uncomfortable ;)
- Zealotux 4y agoIt's unlikely since he would've immediately felt the pain when grabbing the leaf in the first place.
- epiccoleman 4y agoI 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.
- moron4hire 4y agoWe 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.
- rahidz 4y agoI can understand it causing pain, but what mechanism causes some lingering pain to last for 9 months??
- patrickwalton 4y agoI assumed many of the small needles remain in the skin and are difficult to remove fully.
- blantonl 4y agoyup, 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"
- photochemsyn 4y agoRecent research (2020) revealed these plants containt a potent protein neurotoxin: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abb8828 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abb8828 > "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.
- nemo44x 4y agoWon'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.
- photochemsyn 4y agoNo need to go right to the worst case scenario. Cone snail venom, for example, has been a source of useful medicines: https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2017/10/how-cone-snails-deadly-venom-can-help-us-build-better-medicines https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2017/10/how-cone-snail...
- 1024core 4y agoI always wonder: how tf did evolution end up designing such a thing?
- MagicMoonlight 4y agoA plant that is hurty gets eaten less and survives better. The hurtier it gets, the better it survives until it is the hurtiest.
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- zhte415 4y agoThe Wikipedia article on it has a section on the toxicity and mechanism should anyone else be curious too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrocnide_moroides#Mechanism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrocnide_moroides#Mechanism
- eloff 4y agoEven 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.
- hilbert42 4y agoI 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.
- foobarian 4y ago> 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 :-)
- eutropia 4y agoMade a mess from bursting into laughter from this. Cheers
- xipho 4y agoI 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.
- every 4y agoI 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... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cnidoscolus_texanus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cnidoscolus_texanus
- John23832 4y agoIt's crazy that the evolution in isolation caused literally everything in Australia to become made for killing everything not from Australia. You would think that independent evolution would cause some benign evolution as well. Nope. Australia went the "kill everything" route.
- 0xbadcafebee 4y agoSo, I'm never going hiking in Australia, then.
- senectus1 4y agomeh it's not that bad. 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 :-)
- dekhn 4y agoReminds me of devil's club (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
- gonzo41 4y agoThis is a great video about just this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BoVME0xrQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BoVME0xrQY
- AlbertCory 4y agoI've been to Oz three times. I love stories like this. Just yesterday we had this story: https://abcnews.go.com/International/police-hunt-man-platypus-wild-showed-off-commuters/story?id=98399164 https://abcnews.go.com/International/police-hunt-man-platypu... I wonder why the platypus didn't go, "OK, mate, you wanted a taste of the wild? Here you go then." (stings him)
- anotherevan 4y agoWhile 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. https://youtu.be/kdihHnaOQsk https://youtu.be/kdihHnaOQsk