In reply to AramilNailo (msg # 12):

Or maybe somebody said to the spider, "Hey, see those weird looking things over in Africa?  They won't be getting to Australia for a couple of million years, and you won't be able to eat them.  So you don't need a venom that can kill them."

And the spider replied, "Fruit that, dude!  Give me something that'll kill them, so I can give them a surprise when they show up!"

Sounds legit.

Probably deals with enzymes and molecules and all that fun stuff.

On positive side, Australia's fauna may be crazily deadly, but Australian cities seem to be fine. I've heard that, recently, Melbourne (or was it Sydney?) was named as the city that's the best to live in out of the whole world.

Also, there's something very positive in Australia's climate. True story: my cousin and his wife have been trying to have children for over ten years. Then, they moved to Australia... and, a few months later, they got pregnant :))

If people were actually more likely to have children/get their partners pregnant in Australia I'd think of that as another reason not to go there. >_>

Need to reproduce faster due to the high death rate.  ;)

Heh.

But the story with my cousin's wife is true... I don't know how that works, but sometimes a drastic change in climate can be beneficial in such matters.

I've been wondering for years how much of it was all hype.

Ever since I saw the great Steve Irwin do a segment about the animals of North America.

There he was, in his excited little boy voice, in his usual style...

"Look at the teeth 'ee's got!  He could take my ahm off with ONE BITE!"

And there I was, thinking...  "That's a chipmunk."

Read about those irukandji things. Seriously, they are scary...

I went to Australia when I was a kid. Beautiful country, and I didn't get killed once.

Honestly, I didn't see a single creature that was lethal the entire time I was there (2 months) not counting what was in zoos and such. It's a place I'd like to return to and would certainly recommend to others.

there is a reason Australia is put on the backside of the planet...it's a place no normal human should ever find his way to..... But then again it has been rumored that Australians aren't exactly normal humans...( meant as a compliment..I don't want anyone giving my number to a cable snake.....)

Perhaps this is why Britain decided to 'colonize' it by sending those from their prisons.  Send their roughest and toughest over and those that survive will be all the stronger for it.

Aussie kids are taught a few common-sense survival techniques: don't leave your clothes lying on the floor, shake your boots out before you put them on, don't play with spiders or snakes, don't go crawling under the verandah...
The kids that listen to their parents survive to adulthood. ;)

I spent a couple of weeks over there. You just treat the wildlife like street gangs - keep your nose clean and you're fine, start poking it into their business and you'll end up six feet under.

I saw the beach signs warning about jellyfish, and the bottles of vinegar kept on the life ring posts, I also saw beach signs warning of salt-water crocodiles that like to lurk in the mangroves at the top of the beach, and I saw the spider webs under the eaves, with funnel openings the size of a silver dollar (a crown coin, for my fellow Brits). I stayed in a hut that had snake-tracks in the dirt vanishing among the stilts under the hut, I had to put my bags on a table in the hut because of the green ants that were marching in a column across the floor, and there was a black widow ensconced in the bathroom, but I left them all alone and they left me alone.

The beaches are beautiful and unspoilt by armies of overweight tourists in deck chairs, and the bats are amazing to watch as night falls. And the stars in the outback, shining from an alien sky, and the sun crossing the sky from right to left...

Yeah I'm still alive, and I'd go back again and again - if I could afford the air fare. That's the real killer. :(

North America has its quota of dangerous wildlife, too - wolves, bears, rattlers, black widows... How often do they kill you guys?

We have it easy in the UK - that's probably why we colonize the rest of the planet; to get some kicks. ;)

The most predatory creature I've met in the UK was the seagull that swiped my fish and chips when I was a kid...

You do know it started as a British pineal colony? They sent people there they didn't care if the lived or died.

When they got free I guess it was a matter of the place being breathtakingly beautiful and pure stuberness.  lol

I fell more bad about how bad those Brits mucked up there ecosystem. They brought some rabbits I think over, idk but whatever it was had no natural predator there so the multiplied like crazy. It became a huge problem so they brought some of there predator over and it multiplied like crazy..... Sound familiar? Yah well the whole "send a _____ in after the _____" and blah blah blah stuff came from this. Every time the animal they brought over got out of hand so they brought over another to deal with it.  It was utterly mindblowing how long this went on before some one thought that maybe bringing in more animals was a bad idea.

X.x

The thing is though, when you travel, you get the most interesting conversations.

I was going through luggage scan on the Paris side of the Eurostar, and they asked me if I was English (English passport) and I said no, I'm Australian.  All this was in French.

Then suddenly the security guard gets this freaked out look on his face and said, in English:
"Oh my god, where are you from?"
"Perth."
"I went there in 2000!!!! On holiday.  And the day before I arrived there was a fatal shark attack and I spent two weeks too terrified to get into the water. It was near Perth somewhere."

I said "Yeah, Cottesloe beach, the guy was a lawyer."
"Yes!!!! Cottesloe!!!"


The ecosystem thing is true, introduced cats, rabbits, foxes, cane toads etc have done incredible damage, but the other thing that's really hurt the landscape and the environment has been trying to implement the European method of farming in a country with a totally different ecosystem.

Cutting all the trees down to make nice fields, and siphoning all the water out of the rivers has not gone down brilliantly well.  And now native fauna like kangaroos can get up to plague proportions because the food is so easy for them to get to, and the only predator they have is an idiot with a four wheel drive and a gun.  Which contrary to popular belief, we don't have enough of to keep the numbers down.  So kangaroos are now at vermin levels in some parts of the country.

But that's okay, we kill them and convince foreigners to eat them as "fancy cuisine".

I ate kangaroo once.  Sainsbury's had it on offer (just like they had ostrich and shark at other times).  So I had this kangaroo steak sitting on the plate, smelling delicious.  So I looked at my wife, then at the plate, and I poked the steak, gently, with my fork.

And in my best Australian accent, I asked, "Is that you, Skippy?"

Oh, the laughing we did...

Yah the whole thing with all the animals they introduced was ridiculous.

A got in... lets bring B to get rid of A... oh crap bring C to get rid of B... quick bring D to get rid of C... oh man this is bad bring in E to get rid of D...

X.x

you think they would have figured out a lot sooner that this was not working out well.

Oh and lets try a form of farming that works on the other side of the world in a 100% different climent.... and not give up on it regardless of how poorly it works.

If you ever meet Australians who think Brits are stupid... they have rather good reasoning to.....

In reply to Azraile (msg # 28):

But introducing things isn't always intentional, of course.  The invasive earthworms brought to North America came in the roots of fruit trees being shipped over for orchards.

Then again, sometimes it seems intensely stupidly intentional, like the introduction of carp to North American rivers.

I think the difference is that NA's ecosystems aren't nearly so delicate, so it doesn't seem as obvious how things have been radically altered.


Oh and: Roo is delicious!
This message was last edited by the user at 17:16, Sat 16 Aug 2014.

Funny thing, despite the fact that the US has large, predators such as mountain lions, Bears, wolves. there are few attacks. And fewer fatalities. Rattlesnakes, are dangerous but they are not deadly, thier venom can kill if no medical treatment or first aid is available but few people die from rattler bites.

Black widows, and coral snakes both have an odd factor that keeps them from being as dangerous as they could be..their fangs are weak and small compaired to other species...not like a funnel we which can

http://historylist.wordpress.c...s-caused-by-animals/


http://www.bobinoz.com/migrati...-truth-about-deaths/

I looked over the numbers on both pages.  Australia has around 20-21 million people in roughly the same area as the US since the US has a population around 300 million.. If deaths per year are roughly equal.... Australia has 10 times the number of deaths per million...

until you add in deer, squirrels, dogs, cats, and farm animals causing accidents....

A lot of the people who die here are tourists.  :)

Australia?  What about Florida?

Is Australia built on a porous limestone base with millions of cavities in the "earth" which can dissolve a little more and have a sinkhole upon up underneath a person's bedroom?  Here's two, and they're far from being the only ones.
http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/01/us/florida-sinkhole/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...video_n_2948846.html

Australia, as we all know, is a giant desert landscape and you can see poisonous snakes from a great distance.  Florida is filled with mangrove trees growing on the meridians of every public road and has alligators and pythons lurking amongst them.  Florida even has pythons big enough to eat an alligator!  The 9-footers are big enough to eat children and people have found (living in the wild), a 45-foot long 780 pound snake!
http://abcnews.go.com/US/pytho...th/story?id=14373295
http://mogul.ws/780lb-giant-snake-found-in-florida/

Not to mention the fire ants, those terrible mounds of ants whose bite burns like fire.
http://solutionsforyourlife.uf...arden/fire_ants.html

And crazy ants, which are basically fire ants except they're super social and don't fight among each other so their numbers grow faster and unlike fire ants they (seriously, in the words of Dave Barry I am not making this up) love electricity and will swarm a house, roaming through the walls and chewing the insulation off all the wires:  And if one dies, its death releases a chemical which summons more ants, so if you ever accidentally kill one, or try to spray some ant spray or God forbid one electrocutes itself to death while it's chewing on your wires, the next day you'll have massive amounts of crazy ants swarming your house.
http://io9.com/5846945/souther...k-electrical-systems

And you remember those jellyfish off the coast of Australia?  Yeah, basically the same things off the coast of Florida.  It's why that woman who swam from Cuba to Florida had to wear a full-body silicone suit with a mouth flap to be able to survive the basically invisible swarms of jellyfish with 40-foot long tentacles.
http://www.annemergmed.com/art...bstract?rel=nofollow

Not to mention the regular hurricanes which rip through Florida every year.  I'm not even going to bother linking a news article, everyone should already be familiar with those.

And the super-high humidity in Florida which just makes life unbearable.  And because of the super high humidity, the constant stench of raw sewage since septic systems really don't work very well but people keep putting them in, and even the regular sewage systems just overflow too easily.  Although you may not be smelling raw sewage, you might actually be smelling grass that's rotting on the shoreline from the super high heat/humidity:
http://www.keysweb.info/infopages/tourist_tips.htm

And I have literally just scratched the surface of everything wrong with Florida.  Only an insane person would want to live in Florida.  I recommend that people go move as far away as they can and go live around the world somewhere safe, somewhere like Australia.

Who cares about Florida it will be a hundred feet under water in twenty years.

Drownd Micky Drownd maw ha ha ha ha ha!!!!!

Eh. I've lived in Australia since 1985. I'm not going to say it doesn't have any poisonous/dangerous animals - it clearly does. But like the vast majority of animals; they don't go out of their way to attack you. If you go bushwalking; make lots of noise, snakes will go away. Shake out your boots before putting them on. Don't poke the spider. Basically, don't do anything stupid.

Why go bushwalking at all???

In reply to willvr (msg # 34):

Not doing anything stupid does not work against irukandji, though :(

Bushwalking is fun.

... As a kid, I frequently swam at beaches in Australia. Number of times I was stung? Never. One of my local beaches frequently had box jellyfish washed up on the beach.

WHen there are things like those particular jellyfish; or sharks that have picked up a taste for human flesh; there are warnings about them. Go into the water when there's a warning out for them? That counts as stupid.