Okay but platypus venom is actually one of the weirdest things about them.
So like, everyone knows how famously weird platypuses are. Semi-aquatic egg-laying mammals with duck bills and beaver tails, but too few people mention how strange their venom is.
First of all it’s only found on males. I’m no scientist but from my (limited) research, I can’t find any other example of a vertebrate where only one sex has venom. Venom in mammals is rare enough already anyway, but sexual dimorphism in the venom in a mammal is all but unheard of.
Next, platypi primarily use their venom on each other. The males produce venom from their leg knives year round, but venom production goes in to overdrive during mating season, leading scientists to believe that they mainly use it on each other to compete for mates. As an additional not here, not only is it injected through their legs, but they use their legs as a vice, trapping their victims between them and repeatedly stabbing.
Now, what the venom actually *does*. It will temporarily paralyze other platypa, but will quickly kill other small animals. There have been no recorded deaths on humans from platy-venom, but if you get stung by one, you’ll wish you had been thr first. The pain is “immediate, sustained, and devastating”. Fortunately, there have been so few examples of humans being stung that the results are not very well-researched, but what has been seen is enough. It will cause the afflicted area to swell up with extreme pain for days, weeks, or even months. Without end. Even 25 years later there have been reports of continued stiffness and pain in afflicted areas.
I’ve saved the worst for last though.
It’s immune to painkillers.
That’s right, even morphine is inadequate to stop the pain from these guys. You get stung? Debilitating, inescapable pain for months on end with lifelong aftereffects.
Tl;dr: you’re right to be wary of their venomous knees. Never go near a platypus unless you know for certain it’s female.
(Edit: clarified the bit about sexual dimorphism in vertebrates)
oh you liked my post? well i’m going to click on your silly little picture, look through your blog and like some of your posts! let’s see how you like it!
Thinking about when I worked at a shitty restaurant + one night it was just me + 3 other women on closing shift, so some guy came in the back and waved a knife around, presumably for money but I’m not actually certain, bc he was met with the bartender holding a much bigger knife, a tiny teenager wielding a cast iron pan, an elderly woman holding up a crockpot of clearly boiling water, and me, turning on the meat slicer with eye contact for maximum effect. He left, but the moral of the story is not girl power or whatever, it’s just. Why the fuck would you threaten a room full of underpaid and sleep-deprived blue-collar workers surrounded by lethal weapons.
Even ignoring the quantity of workers or weaponry, I think there’s something special about specifically
Basically, market research for japanese bakeries determined that a) they sell more breads and pastries the more different varieties they have, and b) japanese bakery customers prefer items which are not wrapped, because individually wrapped things give the impression of being like, preserved or something instead of fresh and good I guess? So the obvious solution is to sell as many different kinds of unwrapped breads and pastries as you can.
But! In actual practice, that’s a nightmare. No packaging means no barcodes to scan, so the cashier needs to know all like 200 different (often very similar) items by heart and add them up manually, which means training new employees is a slow and painful process and customer service in general suffers badly. And having a person handle all those un-packaged foodstuffs to count them or examine them, in addition to being slow and clumsy, is unsanitary as fuck.
So one bakery chain owner approached this computer guy in 2007 asking for a system to automate the checkout process. It took five years and the company barely survived a financial crisis in the middle, but long story short they developed a highly specialized AI that will look at the pile of bread a customer picked out and automatically identify everything, tally it up, and charge them correctly, while the live cashier is free to make small talk or help people out or whatever. The whole process is simple, fast, sanitary, and pleasant for customers and employees alike, and to an outsider it looks like fucking magical bullshit.
But then in 2017 a doctor saw an ad for this bakery scanning system and it occurred to him that cells under a microscope don’t look all that different from weird loaves of bread. And it turns out that yeah, you can use almost all of the same code to analyze a tissue sample and pick out any potentially cancerous cells in it. Other people have started buying the same program for everything from analyzing the readout from big physics experiments to labeling charms and amulets for sale at shrines to detecting problems in the wiring on jet engines.
My friend shocked me yesterday by saying she didn’t learn to swim until she was 11 because she grew up in a landlocked state and in an area where pools weren’t common either. For the purposes of this poll, let’s say being able to swim counts as you being able to jump into deep water (pool, lake, river, whatever) and easily get out to dry land on your own.
“When Daddy comes in, he carries you to bed. Is there anything you feel like you could eat, Pokey? Anything at all?
All you can imagine putting in your mouth is a cold plum, one with really tight skin on the outside but gum-shocking sweetness inside. And he and your mother discuss where he might find some this late in the season. Mother says hell I don’t know. Further north, I’d guess.
The next morning, you wake up in your bed and sit up. Mother says, Pete, I think she’s up. He hollers in, You ready for breakfast, Pokey. Then he comes in grinning, still in his work clothes from the night before. He’s holding a farm bushel. The plums he empties onto the bed river toward you through folds in the quilt. If you stacked them up, they’d fill the deepest bin at the Piggly Wiggly.
Damned if I didn’t get the urge to drive to Arkansas last night, he says.
Your mother stands behind him saying he’s pure USDA crazy.
Fort Smith, Arkansas. Found a roadside stand out there with a feller selling plums. And I says, Buddy, I got a little girl sick back in Texas. She’s got a hanker for plums and ain’t nothing else gonna do.
It’s when you sink your teeth into the plum that you make a promise. The skin is still warm from riding in the sun in Daddy’s truck, and the nectar runs down your chin.
And you snap out of it. Or are snapped out of it. Never again will you lay a hand against yourself, not so long as there are plums to eat and somebody-anybody-who gives enough of a damn to haul them to you. So long as you bear the least nibblet of love for any other creature in this dark world, though in love portions are never stingy. There are no smidgens or pinches, only rolling abundance. That’s how you acquire the resolution for survival that the coming years are about to demand. You don’t earn it. It’s given.”
excerpt from Cherry by Mary Karr, context being after a suicide attempt at age 13
Some context: Texas and Arkansas share a corner border. Now, Texas is FECKING HUGE and there are many, many parts of Texas that cannot visit Arkansas overnight, but there are parts where it’s no trouble at all.
However, those places of Texas that are close to Arkansas, do not include “close to Fort Smith, Arkansas.”
The closest Texas gets to Fort Smith is about 185 miles (about 300km), at “a little closer than Texarkana.” (Dallas, fwiw, is about 275 miles/450km from Fort Smith.)
So the dad in this story drove at least SEVEN HOURS round trip, to pick up a bushel of plums for his little girl, in the hope that some almost-out-of-season fruit would convince her to go on living.
Okay.
It’s bigger than this.
According to Wikipedia, the poet Mary Karr was born in 1955 and grew up in Groves, Texas and “lived there until she moved to Los Angeles in 1972.” So she would have been there when she was 13 and attempted suicide.
According to Google Maps, the shortest driving distance between Groves, TX and Fort Smith, AR is 439 miles (or 706 km for metric using folks).
That’s almost 8 hours of driving.
Almost 16 hours roundtrip.
(I assume he broke every speed limit he could.)
That’s how much this man loved his daughter.
May we all be worthy of such love.
May we all be capable of giving such love.
May we all have people in our lives with which we can share this love.
