Y’all, there’s somehow still enough Australia-specific whackadoodlery I haven’t covered yet to fill its own list. I’m convinced there’s always going to be more madness to plunder when it comes to Australian zoology.
The wildlife of Australia is kinda like the humans of Florida in that regard.
Today’s Moment of Science… Hey, did you know? Australia edition.
Because being able to remain completely still and hold its breath for an hour underwater wasn’t enough of a fuck-your-nightmares advantage, the Australian saltwater crocodile has transparent eyelids to stare down its prey. Pleasant dreams.
There are over 900 known species of cone snail with more discovered all the time. They’re carnivorous and have a tooth kinda like a harpoon used to feast on molluscs, fish, and worms. Their conical shells are lovely, but they’re to be admired from afar. If they decide to take revenge for all of their cousins we’ve devoured with butter and garlic, some of the larger ones serve up a chomp that can kill a human.
The Fitzroy River Turtle from Queensland has a special talent. It can breathe through its cloaca. Which is the nice way to say ‘its breath smells like ass.’
The irukandji jellyfish is about the size of the tip of your little finger. Encounters with it are unlikely to result in fatalities, but it’s so small that its victims aren’t likely to notice much other than a minor sting at first. An extremely venomous box jellyfish, its true nature reveals itself on a short time delay. Symptoms can include headache, nausea, back and kidney pain, increased heart rate and blood pressure, and wondering while begging for the sweet release of death why you decided to swim off the coast of fucking Australia.
However, when it comes to squishy murder sacks, the irukandji jellyfish are a tickle compared to the blue ringed octopus. Small and mighty, at 5-8 inches in diameter they have enough venom to kill approximately 25 adult humans. With a painless bite, it’s a swift timeline from the encounter to paralysis and death. There are treatments, but there’s no antivenom.
The koala is an idiot. I mean incredibly, deeply, incomprehensibly dumb. It lives on eucalyptus, which is ridiculous enough because for most of us, that shit’s toxic. But they eat the leaves directly off the plant, and only recognize the leaves on the plant. If you put a koala in a room with piles of eucalyptus leaves pre-picked from the branches? It wouldn’t recognize the leaves as its food and would starve. King of the dumbass marsupials, this one.
The kookaburra is an adorable bird that makes a sound like human laughter. Native to the eucalyptus forests of Eastern Australia, I suspect they’re having a go at the koalas.
Marsupials are from… Montana?! Indeed, all the marsupials in Australia are believed to have evolved from one critter that made its way over from South America via Antarctica. The continent used to be ruled by monotremes. The invasive marsupials evolved into the many breeds of vermicious knids that run the place today, while only two monotremes remain today: the platypus and the echidna. On the other hand, North America’s marsupial family is down to just the Virginia opossum.
Some of the deadliest snakes in the world are in Australia. But in a typical year, how many fatalities actually occur in the country from snakebites? For all the memes, just goddamn two. The place with the most deadly snakebites annually? India, with approximately 50,000 fatalities from snakebites every year.
The invasive species that fuck up Australia seem so innocuous. Bunnies. Kitties. Berries. Wait… Berries?! Indeed, the blackberry bush is a mess of a thorny weed that happens to bear fruit. It grows into thickets that are dangerous for animals, and has an underground root system that can choke out resources from native plants. There are blackberry management programs now that, knowing Australia’s history with these things, will eventually escalate into a fruitful and jampacked war.
This has been your Moment of Science, pretty sure the most dangerous creature in Australia is the feral Pauline Hanson.
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