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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

On a related note: interestingly, humans can develop immunity to ticks. Which means that if a tick bites them, it dies.

https://www.caryinstitute.org/news-insights/media-coverage/h...

Utterly fascinating. Our bodies are so much more complex than I could have imagined.

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Does that make us a poisonous mammal species? Us and the platypi...

We would be poisonous but platypi are venomous.

Shouldn’t it be platypodes?

Yes, Greek root so it ought to be platypodes, but everyone just says platypi. Similar situation as octopus - Greek root, should be octopodes, everyone just says octopuses. What everyone says defines the language, so platypi and octopuses it is.

Who's saying octopuses instead of octopi? It might wrong, but it's succinct wrong.

Apparently the majority of English speakers say octopuses (which is my preference as well, but I'm not a native speaker).

By the way, how do you pronounce octopi? Is it "octo-pee" or "octo-pie"?

pie

You're missing a word, but it seems like you're saying octopuses is wrong. But it's right, and not just because a spot informal weird had been accepted: it's technically correct. As sibling comments have said, the original plural would be octopodes because it's from the Greek, not octopi because it's not from Latin, but English doesn't normal take Greek plurals.

Not everyone -- enough people write "octopi", especially when trying to sound literate, which is irritating. As is "viri" or "virii".

Australian here; I’ve never heard anyone say ‘platypi’. It’s always ‘platypuses’. On the other hand, the plural of ‘octopus’ can be either ‘octopuses’ or ‘octopi’.

I’ve long wanted it to be octopi but my iPhone and most sources say no. Out of the dictionaries, only Oxford English seems to include but says based on a misunderstanding. Some detail on history here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus under pluralisation

Interestingly:

> Historically, the first plural to commonly appear in English language sources, in the early 19th century, is the latinate form "octopi"

That’s quite late and interesting the “wrong” one was first.

Now that you mention it, I'm not sure if I've heard platypi or platypuses more.

You have undoubtedly heard platypuses more often.

I have never seen nor heard anyone write or say “platypi” before now. Some web sleuthing suggests that platypuses is somewhere between 20 and 100 times more common in English.

Your web sleuthing has an American bias. I'm from an English-speaking country but I'm not American.

Are you from the 1830s? https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=platypi%2C+pla...

Platypuses don’t live in North America. Most of the older sources that Google n-gram is pulling from for the above chart are British or Australian.

A substantial proportion of the recent uses of platypi are grammar guides telling people that it should always be spelled platypuses.

Tasmanian here.

It’s only platypuses if you see more than one at a time, and that’s pretty much never gonna happen ;)

Alas, I live in Sydney and have never even seen one in the wild. Hopefully someday I’ll get the opportunity to go where they live.

If I’m going to be wrong I’ll always go with Octopera.

Fun fact: the plural of applepus is apple pie!

with vanilla ice cream

Platypodes is more correct than platypi, but I think that English rules apply once a word is a part of the English language (I don't know who decides that). So it should be platypusses.

this is not a great idea. Even though you might get immunity to ticks, you can still get lime disease.

ticks' bodies are pretty amazing to:

https://www.cdc.gov/ticks/alpha-gal/index.html

Instead of a Lyme vaccine we should work on spreading this to everyone

(Or you know, we could do both.)

Spread it to ticks' normal prey, deer and what ever else they normally feed on.

I’d say humans’ success rate at modifying ecosystems to eliminate parasites is… a failure at best.

Life, uh, finds a way.

So I wouldn’t advocate for that approach.

I know of one success story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracunculus_medinensis is almost gone

That's interesting. I seem to kill small mosquitoes when they bite me. I've observed it multiple times. It lands, it bites and it becomes completely unresponsive. Because I was drunk at the time, I chalked it up to blood alcohol content which will yield quite a bit of alcohol if a mosquito drinks so-and-so many times its own body weight (I did some basic math) but since then it also happened when I was sober.

That's very interesting as well. Could you expand a little on what you mean by them becoming completely unresponsive?

Basically it remains "stuck" in position and completely stops moving, even if I wait 5 minutes. Poking it causes no reaction. I can just pick it up and put it away. It is either dead or it passed out.

I’ve never heard anyone have that experience before. Maybe you should share this phenomenon with some relevant scientists?

Even if you were at 0.5% BAC (legal driving limit is 0.08%, and 0.5% would kill a lot of people), that's still about the alcohol percentage in NA beer. Unlikely to have any effect.

Leaving aside the vast differences in physiology and effects of alcohol on humans vs mosquitoes, mosquitos can drink maybe 2x their body weight in blood. If you drunk 500 bottles of 0.5% a/v beer in 10 minutes it would likely have some effect.

> If you drunk 500 bottles of 0.5% a/v beer in 10 minutes it would likely have some effect.

If you drank the same amount of 0% ABV water in that time, you’d probably die of water intoxication, so I’m not sure any adverse effects of the alcohol would be noticeable.

I'm thinking exploded stomach.

Point is it could be a lot of alcohol for the mosquito.

> If you drunk 500 bottles of 0.5% a/v beer in 10 minutes it would likely have some effect

No, the alcohol wouldn't. Unless you distilled all that beer and ingested the alcohol alone. The massive liquid intake would kill you though.

The liver doesn't store alcohol, so how many grams you ingest in total doesn't matter, only in what concentration. Keep in mind that alcohol is perfectly soluble in water too.

A mosquito can drink 2-3x its body weight. It would not be the same as a NA beer. It would be more like getting a blood transfusion from a drunk.

If it was a pint and the drunk was heroic, it'd be like having 3 or 4 drinks.

(~10 pints of blood in the donor, 1/10 of a lot of alcohol...)

I'm sorry for reading this as "north american" beer instead of "non-alcoholic" beer.

It's an easy mistake to make.

I had this happen to me. For most of my life, barely ever got bitten by mosquitos, and when they did, they usually died while feeding, on my skin.

From age 30 onwards, I suffer them as much as the next guy, not sure what could have changed since.

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