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Comment by cushpush | Hacker News Reader

Stay aground in Oz and all you have to fear is getting talked into drinking goon

On land you'll very likely be bitten by a redback spider, fall over onto the nest of a funnelweb spider which will also bite you and as you roll away in agony you'll roll onto a nest of tiger snakes, death adders, taipans and brown snakes. Leaping up to run away you'll very likely run in a Gympie Gympie tree whose leaves are covered in fine, silica-tipped hairs that release a potent neurotoxin when touched. Australia is a dangerous place.

Best to stay inside programming.

We should demo a mars colony there.

Don't forget to keep an eye out for drop bears too! They're a particularly aggressive species of koala that are known to jump out of trees and attack unsuspecting humans.

I thought they were polar?

bipolar :P

Or the emus. We've gone to war against them and lost.

If you think a tree can't be that bad, the story with Gympie Gympie goes some officer during WW2 did wipe his butt with a leaf, the pain was such that he killed himself.

What the parent doesn't mention in the water alongside the croc and box jelly is the irukandji which is extremely common and extremly dangerous as well while being as small as a fingernail.

With all those things around, Australia is an amazing place, the moral of the story is ask the locals before you do something you'll regret, they are the ones who knows and if you ask before you will be fine

Irukandji are box jellyfish, just tiny small ones.

From wikipedia:

"The first of these jellyfish, Carukia barnesi, was identified in 1964 by Jack Barnes; to prove it was the cause of Irukandji syndrome, he captured the tiny jellyfish and allowed it to sting him, his nine-year-old son and a robust young lifeguard. They all became seriously ill, but survived".

That's some dedication to science.

Australia is where nature makes "NO TRESPASSING" signs.

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