I really want to hug a walrus.
Where do I find you?
Can we watch? I promise will find someone to narrate it.
A dog probably.
Classically cute: an otter.
Quick with a mean bite. And can be very ferocious and territorial, even against humans.
Human babies
Human adults
I’d agree but adults are not always cute. They actually rarely are
Raccoon
Blue ringed octopus. Tiny but deadly.
A blue ringed octopus - they’re a cute looking tiny octopus but quite capable of killing a human.
What’s worst is that after getting bitten by one you will be mentally alert but completely unable to do anything as you feel your body just stop doing things that keep you alive (like breathing)…
as you feel your body just stop doing things that keep you alive (like breathing)…
As I understand it (and to be fair, I’m no octopus scientist or human medical doctor) it’s pretty much just breathing that’s the issue. It doesn’t really directly cause any damage on its own (though the consequences of not breathing can and will of course cause quite a lot of damage in pretty short order)
The venom causes paralysis, basically by (someone correct me if I’m wrong) clogging up the receptors your body uses to send signals to your muscles. It will all get cleared up in about 24 hours or so though.
Problem is that you use some of those muscles to breathe. But if you make it to shore (you also need some of those muscles to swim) and if you get put on a ventilator right away (to do the breathing for you,) your prognosis is actually pretty good and there’s a nearly 100% survival rate (although that has to be two of the biggest “ifs” in all of medicine)
Another thing that comes to mind is your heart also uses muscles to do its thing, and I’m not totally clear on why that doesn’t seem to be a factor here, since paralyzing those muscles is basically just instant cardiac arrest. I did a bit of googling, but I’ll be honest I was in deep over my head in medical jargon and couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. I think my takeaway is that tetrodotoxincan affect the heart muscles, but I guess for whatever reason (dosage? Different kinds of muscles? The way your body processes the venom and moves it around your body? I really don’t know) it just kind of doesn’t, which I guess is lucky for us. I’m kind of hoping someone who speak doctor will maybe see this and give an ELI5 answer to that.
I suspect there’s probably a lot of minor consequences, like I bet your next trip to the bathroom once you recover in going to be some sort of event after your bowels stopped moving for 24 hours, but otherwise it seems like if you hang out on a ventilator for a day unable to move (which, to be fair, is probably one of the last ways I’d want to spend a day, but I guess it narrowly beats out a refrigerated cubby in the morgue) you’re pretty much in the clear to get on with your life.
An anaesthesist friend of mine once told me that there are two kinds of muscles - the ones you can actively control (such as muscles in arms and legs and also the muscles for breathing) and those you cannot, such as your heart and intestine-muscles (around the gut etc.). The latter has a different kind of receptors and isn’t affected by the stuff that they use in hospitals to put you down, but since the breathing is stopped, you’ll always be intubated.
I guess this poison is of the same kind but I don’t know the technicalities…
To explain it in simple terms, your heart doesn’t get its beating signal from the brain, the sinus node takes care of that and is located in the heart. What the brain (and other parts of your body) does is tell the heart to beat faster or slower when required. So the kind of paralysis caused by the octopus doesn’t affect your heart because it doesn’t need to use any external pathways to send the signal to the muscle to contract.
Most big cats are extremely cute and do silly kitty-like things.
Big cats can also be more-or-less tamed if they’re raised from a very, very young age by people. The issue, most of the time, is that big cats play just like house cats, and that kind of play can easily be fatal when the cat is the same size or larger than a human. House cats aren’t actually domesticated; they’re just tame, most of the time.
There are a number of IG accounts of wild cat rescues, or other big cats that live with humans, and they’re quite friendly because they were raised with and by people. But they’re still potentially deadly.
That is part of the reason why I’d get terrified - I have a scar on my leg from a house cat. (A friend of mine brought a kitty that he just adopted here, I was holding the kitty on my arms, Kika saw it as an invader and… well, she attacked the thing nearest to the invader that she could reach, i.e. my leg.) So when I see those big cats I can’t help but imagine a 30x larger house cat, with all the dangers that it entails. And the associated cuteness.
Oh, you are absolutely right. Feral cats can fuck you up, because they have zero qualms about using ultraviolence.
We’ve only had cats for 12,000-15,000 years. We’ve had dogs for almost 200,000 years. Give them another 30,000 years and we might have actually domesticated some cats.
I find it more likely that the cats will finish domesticating us
It seems that dogs actually domesticated us far more than anything else, thus far. If cats manage that, hopefully they avoid the trap of being domesticated along with us, because at this point we aren’t the angry chimpanzee, and orangutan hybrid that evolved into Neanderthal and Homo Erectus.
Tiger
Giant anteater
What terrifies you about them?
Maybe it’s the claws strong enough to rip concrete apart. That hey are known to have killed jaguars with.
A jaguar? The fastest land animal got killed by the animal equivalent of a camping table? For shame.
Fastest land animal is the cheetah, which is at home in Africa.
The jaguar is a South American mammal, just like the giant anteater. And dude…
Between 2010 and 2012, two hunters were killed by giant anteaters in Brazil
Those huge claws are incredibly sharp and attached to arms… again, strong enough to tear concrete apart. Carl has a good video on it.
Fair enough.
hippopotamus
Dogs. They’re the one animal I can actively get close to daily which depending on upbringing can either be very loving and sweet, or absolutely territorial monsters.
When I was in high school there was one of those dogs, he’d bark lightly, or his front paws on the picket fence and wag his tail extra hard, which are normally signs of wanting to be pet, except if you got within petting range he’d go for a bite.
Cat’s at least get away from you if they don’t want attention. I’ve learned more about dog body laungauge since high school, but I’ve also been bitten since then on just a random walk by (not going for a pet) just as the owner was saying it didn’t bite. It did.
Though I suppose terrified it’s a bit much. Wary is more like it.
Otter. They’re a bunch of water gangster, they are fierce and they will bite. Even crocodiles and snake fear them when in group, human should leave them alone. Freaking cute creature though i just wanna pet one.
It helps that they smell godawful. They’re funny and cute and adorable but the whole otter smells like a butthole, which stops me from petting them. Barely.
“Oh look, they gonna head up on him!”
Some river otters seriously fucked up a couple of women up not long ago.
Bats. Some species really look like adorable little sky kittens. But they are also significant disease carriers, ranging from rabies to ebola. Bats themselves have evolved to be immune to things that can kill us and other animals.
It’s why you should never, EVER touch a bat. Just don’t.
Drop bears. Or maybe baby hoop snakes.
Tree lobsters?
