Really want to be terrified? "Why the US Drops 14.7 Million Worms On Panama Every Week" th-cam.com/video/Olj8arvfYj4/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=HalfasInteresting
@@sepg5084Ecological studies about the biome and cycle of being eaten are done all the time, especially if you're talking about "useless creatures" like mosquitoes. Since we're already getting rid of animals with global warming, we might as well direct it towards the "enemies of mankind".
@@sepg5084How could we extinct a species? Poor, poor smallpox and other diseases Huh? Yes there will be negligible consequences other than the fact we don’t have to deal with this.
I still hate wasps tho, they’re just bees but douchebags. Most of the ecologically beneficial things wasp do could be replaced by just having more bees
@@rohanshah7559 unfortunately, not really. I've been stung by wasps, so I hate them as well, but they regulate the population of other insects that would irreparably damage their ecosystems by overeating certain important flora thus causing deforestation. I've also seen flystrike in sheep in real life and it's skin-crawlingly horrifying
@@Alexagrigorieff Screwflies are a specific kind of botfly. Botflies are any parasitic fly where the larva are internal parasites of mammals and screwworms qualify.
@@prophetzarquon1922 We are thriving though. Also, lignin was about equally indigestible as plastic when it first developed, and thats the reason we have uniform coal lines.
yeah like dodos. just big as hell chickens. they were literally in existence not even that long ago, relatively. they just had zero survival instinct and we killed them all.
@@airgin3000not OP but my brother had one. Layed its eggs on a mosquito and he got bit, egg fell in and a week later we noticed something was wrong. We caught it early and pulled it out ourselves with a electronic microscope tweasers and gause+polysporn. We essentially blocked its oxygen and than pulled it out when it’s breathing tube came out. It was very traumatizing and has spikes to prevent removal via pulling, do not remove them this way unless you catch them VeRY early as even a small one hurt my bother a lot and the process was nasty.
I'd heard of botflies but never screwworms, I never imagined there was a creature with less justification for continued existence than ticks (beaten narrowly by mosquitos), but here we are.
@@bud389 nah, but think of it this way. If mosquitos didn't exist, then we could have more fish and frog, and an equal or slightly smaller amount of birds. The only consequence is reduced biodiversity, but the number still positively trade, overall. I wouldn't move this argument too much past this point, because that's a slippery slope in the making, but I think it can clearly work to some degree.
@@legion999 Just did a quick search and found something interesting. Apparently, minimum parking space law are categorized as pseudoscience since it’s based on assumptions rather than facts. On the other hand, an example I can think of is people thinking MSG is dangerous. It’s just a mixture of salt and glutamate. Glutamate existed in most food we eat daily. MSG is probably healthier than chemical preservatives.
I clicked on this after seeing the headline with the attitude of “these fools, don’t they know what playing God leads to??” And by the end of the two minutes I was like “no no… he’s got a point” 😂
To some degree we're already playing god with the sterile fly drops he mentioned. Tom Scott covered it, but he kind of underplayed the horror of screw worms.
Forgot who the guy was, but a professor / entomologist was in the news because he let a single bottfly larva grow in his arm to full term for his students- it's now part of the collection in the bug vault where the other specimens he caught are recorded.
like... first of all - why would anyone do that. second of all - why can't i have a teacher that does anything helpful for their students? my teachers just try to fail me 24/7 i swear. this guy is sacrificing his arm for his students entertainment???
@@t_c5266 Ivermectin is an FDA approved medication used to treat roundwomrs, threadworms, and more. It's still prescribed. Using the veterinary stuff can be bad because its dosed for a large animal, and it being an agent used to destroy eukaryotic organisms, can have some pretty severe side effects. You can use it safely, if you dose it properly, but it also isn't held up to the same purity standards. Either way, it will work, you just have to be smarter than the average antimasker trying to use a dewormer to prophylactically treat a virus.
I have experience with bot flies in Costa Rica. They got in my dog a couple times and squeezing them out was awful. My ex father in law down there got some in his shoulder and he wouldn't let me pop them out, the pharmacies there are used to removing them. They're called "torcilo" in Costa Rica and they're common anywhere that has cows.
Hello, I'm from the Perez Zeledón area, so i pronounce it as "torsalo", we got screwworms here already, The difference is that they are smaller and you will find like 15 or 25 on the same spot, we call em "guano barrenador", terrible, now you have to spend more on high quality ivermectin to keep the cattle healthy.
I've heard people say mosquitos should be wiped out, but I've long suspected too many species -- frogs, fish, other insects, etc. -- feed on them. Eradicating the screwworm though... that's something I can get behind.
I don't think any mosquito predators rely entirely or even mainly on these insects for food. So long as any attempt to eradicate them didn't harm other insect species, I believe there would be very few negatives.
As with the above; mosquitos are not a staple to the diets of anything that prey upon them, and even tend to harm everything they prey upon as well as occasionally their own predators. Mosquitos spread diseases to even species which eat them (by being quick vectors for diseases to spread into epidemics) with no time to evolve defences against, essentially meaning that they're an ecological time-bomb even where they are seemingly fitting into a 'natural balance'.
@AJPemberton Also, it turns out that it's only 2 or 3 species of mosquito that transmit malaria, and even then, mostly the females older than breeding age. There was one experiment a while back to alter the mosquito's genes or something to make the females die after laying eggs, and thus stop malaria without making the mosquito's extinct.
@@AJPemberton most animals survive food-wise by rather close margins. Even if they're not a main food source they could still be a life or death difference for many animals, + they have a unique role in the ecosystem that no other creature has or can fill. Probably a bad idea to wipe them out altogether.
I know adder bites can be bad, but mostly are a concern for nosey pets unless you habitually hike without ankle protection. Not aware of any other poisonous snakes, guessing those zany Victorians decided to keep things interesting by importing some fresh new nightmares from elsewhere again.
Its okay, Mitch! It's not like there are tiny fish that will jump into your urethra while peeing. You only have to worry about fish like Candirú in the Amazon rainforest!
@@MagnumCarta it's never been proven that's ever happened though. It appears to have been only a local urban legend as no known cases have ever been found.
@@Kyle-vg2io This is one of the few times I’ve seen someone say “If you don’t know what this is, don’t find out” and actually listened. My morbid curiosity is not strong enough today.
GMOs at their finest!! There are efforts to do this with invasive mosquitoes that spread malaria, West Nile and zika. People balk at the term "GMO" but don't know what it really means and how much genetic engineering has and will continue to help the world.
The IRS, apparently. It only costs the US gov't $15 million to maintain the "solid wall of sterile screworms" that he mentioned in the video. That's an *extremely* small amount of money for the US federal gov't (I would know, I read government budget documents for fun). If you live in the US, are a US citizen, or know anyone who is, write (or ask them) to write to a Congressman asking for this program to be expanded further into South America. (I imagine the best way forward would be to start from the Southern tip - Tierra del Fuego - and move up north until the screworm eradication zone meets the Panama barrier.
@@grimbleahoy I know you're joking, but I'd be actually happy about that. They aren't the correct team for it, but I'm sure they could hire someone onto the firm who is.
When I was in America around 30 years ago I got botfly, I simply drank so much alcohol including absinthe that they could not wait to get out my skin, like woke up in a drunken mess with blood and pus on sheets and bot maggots trying to get away from my body. I think Absinth was never a drink but a medicine.
Wormwood in absinthe is a vermifuge. Aka "internal bug" killer, and has been used that way for a few millennia apparently. It's the controversial ingredient supposedly making it "hallucinogenic" (not possible in normal drinking amounts or even a few bottles btw). And was banned for a while because a drunk that killed his family blamed the specific drink to get a lighter sentence, it caused mass hysteria after the trial.
The unfortunate thing is that there is always so much resistance to any sort of project to modify an ecosystem or run geoengineering projects, even when they are for a humane, ethical, or even vital reason. We have already changed the world enough to cause environmental instability in some ecosystems, we have a responsibility to use our technology to correct it and make things better. In this case, the available cattle made things a lot worse because the worm could breed from them.We are far beyond the point where it's fine to just avoid any further impacts and let nature do it's own thing.
Before cattle there were other large mammals that it fed from. Perhaps there was a period where humans causing American (both North and South) megaforna to die off reduced food before cattle refilled that niche but without humans the fly would have plenty of food.
You do realize you're saying we should give up, right? Almost everything we've intentionally done to ecosystems has negatively impacted biodiversity in some way.
When it's something like these worms it's easy to agree to make them disappear, but what about the rest ? What happens when you give corporations the control of nature's ressources ? What if they can't be found naturally anymore ? The seeds, the plants, the fruits, the animals, the water sources etc... What if they become "corrupted" somehow ?
Nature has never done it's own thing, all those pesky little critters within nature such as ourselves do 'our' own thing. Nature itself is just a small set of basic rules: Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten.
its kinda like how irrational enviormentalism can actually hurt real enviornmental issues, like how people being paranoid about nuclear power has legitimately set back decarbonization decades and has had countries like germany basically go back to coal and oil again because they got rid of nuclear plants.
That's an interesting perspective. When it comes to animal welfare, we don't generally consider shit nature does, no matter what we might be able to do about it or how horrendous the suffering it causes animals is. It's only really disturbing to us if humans are the ones doing it.
I suppose because we know humans can whether or not to cause harm. An animal can't really make that choice. Good and evil depends on the choices made, if a being can't make a choice, or understand said choice, then it doesn't commit evil.
I believe this man is very very intelligent. The pace at which he describes things combined with the concise and understandable vocabulary tells me he really is just that smart, and not pretending. That is insane.
Satan: Don't look at me. I may be the ruler of Hell who torments sinners for all eternity but I have sweet spot for critters. This abomination is either from the man upstairs or Cthulhu. And I know Cthulhu well enough to say he would only use these things on humans.
Your world is so simple it's kind cute how ridiculous it is. Everything good: God Everything not good: Satan. Source of this information? God, supposedly. I call that a biased source. ;)
Does this channel present anything on Chagas parisitism? It's treatable at early stagesm at early agesm but currently kills about 12,000 per year in South America, and there are estimated to be millions who are infected, but don't show easily-detected symptoms; sadly, many will suffer from nervous system or cardiac problems that might be attributed to other causes. Given the high rate of infections, and its possible transmission congenitally, or through blood transfusion, it's probably a 'useful' idea to have screening of South American immigrants, not as any form of 'discrimination', but to establish whether they are infected, and/or treatable, and to establish a level of control of its transmission.
TIL that what we call "berne" here in my region of southeast Brasil (rural), is called screwworm. I know multiple people that have had them, ALL my dogs have had them, and to be honest, it's not as bad as you say, like, no one i knew took morphine, they just felt "stinging and biting" and i can easily remove them from my dogs, just by pinching them like you would pop a zit. Just gotta be careful not to burst them, or the wound will get infected by the dead screw worm inside ( if you can't remove the dead worm with pincers that is). But I've never had dogs or animals die from them. You usually either get them out yourself or just spray "silver spray" on the wound to kill the worm. It freaking sucks, you gotta watch out when your resting outside for flies like these. This doesn't happen in large cities tho. If i told someone in the city this, they wouldn't believe me. BUT, if there was an animal i could totally eradicate, it would be fleas and ticks (mainly fleas) Those are the real pests... If Berne was our biggest problems, damn, I'd be happy.
Two minutes prior, I had never heard of a “screw worm.” Now, this guy’s got me grabbing the can of 99% DEET spray as I realize that we can’t expect God to do all the work.
Incidentally causing animal species to go extinct: cringe Deliberately causing the extinction of animal species for our own benefit: unfathomably based
I thought Austin Burt came up with the gene drive. He told me about it when I was an undergrad ~1990. We discussed its potential application in malaria vector control.
Careful of utilitarist integrals. If you don't discount things happening in the future, all your integrals are undefined (infinite area both above and below the x-axis, increasing uncertainty, bla). If you do discount the far future, what discount function are you using? Different ones will produce vastly different results. I can't say I'm a fan of screw worms, but that kind of calculation scares me, because it can be used to justify anything by cherry picking the effects you are calculating and the ones you aren't.
Thanks for the numerical comparison of impact. I think we all struggle to get an absolute appreciation of anything over say 10^6 so direct comparison with another ‘harm’ is very helpful!
The amount of botfly larva I’ve seen on tiny little creatures in them animal rehabilitation videos is so devastating. There’s usually so many them on creatures that are only slightly bigger than my hands little baby animals, it’s so painful to watch🥺
I agree with most of this, but not the math used against factory farming. You use 10^6 years * 10^9 animals/year for screwworms, but then 100 years * 10^13 factory farmed animals. Why? It'd make sense if we expected 10^6 more years of screwworms, and only 100 more years of factory farming (after which both would stop), but that seems overly optimistic wrt factory farming to me, I don't think we're stopping that anytime soon. Without good info on when either would stop, the only thing that actually matters here is the rate (which would leave factory farming as 10000x worse).
Horror movie producers should definitely have this guy in their contacts... He'd be a unique asset both in plot development and when pitching movie studios🤣
For those who have never seen the horror of screwworm infestation on a living animal, especially deer, it is hands down one of the absolute most gruesome sights you will ever witness and it will leave you with the heebee jeebees that will haunt you for days or possibly weeks!!! Look up pics of it of deer in Florida that get infected when a big storm blows some in from below Panama!! You won’t forget it ever!!
"Let the Gaians preach their silly religion, but one way or the other I shall see this compound burned, seared, and sterilized until every hiding place is found and until every last Mind Worm egg, every last slimy one, has been cooked to a smoking husk. That species shall be exterminated, I tell you! Exterminated!" -(BTW, we already use genetic engineering to create malaria-transfering mosquitos that become infertile on the next generation. It's been years ago, I think I need to read about the results)- nope, it's still theorised about, also, non-malaria-transfering mosquitos were created recently
Comparing a million years to 100 years and saying it's two orders of magnitude more devastating? Sure, if you ignore the other four orders of magnitude.
I think the reason for the different time frames is that he assumes factory farming will cease within 100 years no matter what--if not for animal welfare reasons, then for environmental or economic reasons.
@@PopeGoliath to put it another way, letting these things continue to exist for the averge natural lifespan of a species is equal in damage to 10,000 years of modern artificial animal farming. I think that’s a better, clearer way of describing the idea with the same figures he’s using.
Obviously I’d need to know more, see the studies and evidence (or at least trust that smarter people than me did the work), but I’m sold on the premise!
He says wounds, but that doesn't let you know how terrifying they really are. A wound as small as a tick bite, is enough for a botfly to lay their eggs.
How are you going to compare 1 million years of screwworm existence to 100 years of farming lol. The apples to apples comparison should be over the same time span. Otherwise nice video.
![CAMPปลิ้น | EP.83[2/2] ประสบการณ์ขนหัวลุกจากตำนานวงการผี!](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/T_kFecQw7Ds/mqdefault.jpg)
Didn't even know what a screwworm was until 2 minutes ago.
Now I'm radicalized against these living nightmares.
I have been dealing with them as a farmer, it's focking horrendous, I hate it
Really want to be terrified? "Why the US Drops 14.7 Million Worms On Panama Every Week" th-cam.com/video/Olj8arvfYj4/w-d-xo.html&ab_channel=HalfasInteresting
the great worm wall runs on a budget of 50m
OMG no, we have to preserve nature! Think of what this would do to biodiversity, the balance of nature must not be disrupted!
@@ATozz87 theres other types of flies that don't torture everything in their paths
this is an environmental mega-project i can get behind
And what would be the consequences for making these extinct? How can they be so sure that there will be zero consequences?
@@sepg5084 It was very explicitly mentioned in the video that it has been done before. It's tested.
@@sepg5084 you didn't watch the full video did you?
@@sepg5084Ecological studies about the biome and cycle of being eaten are done all the time, especially if you're talking about "useless creatures" like mosquitoes. Since we're already getting rid of animals with global warming, we might as well direct it towards the "enemies of mankind".
@@sepg5084How could we extinct a species? Poor, poor smallpox and other diseases Huh? Yes there will be negligible consequences other than the fact we don’t have to deal with this.
sorry wasps for ever thinking you were the worst insect alive
I still hate wasps tho, they’re just bees but douchebags. Most of the ecologically beneficial things wasp do could be replaced by just having more bees
If I could magically swap all the yellowjackets in my general vicinity for honeybees, I would.
@@rohanshah7559 unfortunately, not really. I've been stung by wasps, so I hate them as well, but they regulate the population of other insects that would irreparably damage their ecosystems by overeating certain important flora thus causing deforestation. I've also seen flystrike in sheep in real life and it's skin-crawlingly horrifying
Malevolent wasp vs Malicious screw wormworm
@@rohanshah7559 no? wasps are very efficient hunters. they kill pest insects. bees can't and won't do that.
I hate screwworms now
Screw em'!
All my homies hate screwworms
@@JamesThomas-kx5sj As they should.
Yeah I agree. I thought they were ok before but they sound like dicks.
these four words made me laugh unreasonably
Now I am become Death, Destroyer of Bot Flys
different, bot flies are fine and eat carrion, but screw flies are parasites.
It's not botflies. One gets infected by botflies in different way.
@@Alexagrigorieff Screwflies are a specific kind of botfly. Botflies are any parasitic fly where the larva are internal parasites of mammals and screwworms qualify.
@@Alexagrigorieff are you a bot? If you watched the 2m video you'd see he says its a type of botfly...
All the cool stuff goes extinct, meanwhile Bot Fly Maggots are thriving. Good stuff
Good band name btw.
"Whatever creature grew these {plastic bottle} shells around it, must have been thriving, about that time!"
@@prophetzarquon1922 We are thriving though.
Also, lignin was about equally indigestible as plastic when it first developed, and thats the reason we have uniform coal lines.
yeah like dodos. just big as hell chickens. they were literally in existence not even that long ago, relatively. they just had zero survival instinct and we killed them all.
The lamest playstyles are almost always the meta
Mans had me going from "You just wanna play God." To "God gave us dominion over the Earth for a reason." Real fast.
absolute facts
God created the screw worms and was like "I ain't dealing with that sh*t" and gave man a hot potato, that's wild.
This is our Eden, and we are its stewards of the land
@@米空軍パイロットNope. Humans are temporary.
God only exists in your mind
I clicked on this merely to find out what a screwworm is.
Before YT got hysterical about content there were vids of the vile things eating away at children.
@@kellywalker1664Y'know, I think blocking that kind of content is probably a good idea.
@@kellywalker1664there's a joke around here somewhere
@@andrewtyrell4795 God I wish TH-cam had the option to block topics/terms
And now you hate them with every fiber of your being….
This man just committed psychic damage on me at a rate I didnt even imagine possible. I feel like a character in Scanners.
I will never forget the night some friends talked me into going to see it in the theater. For a kinda low-budget film, it was impressive.
Are you secretly a screwworm in disguise?
@@TheEudaemonicPlague It is a CULT CLASSIC now. One of Cronenberg´s best movies.
Fuck yeah, Scanners rules
You don't mean psychic.
Thank you for sharing this. My poor mother got this and has been traumatized ever since.
How bad did she get it?'
How did it happen?
Where was she bit by them?
How was she healed?
@ayyleeuz4892as someone living south of South American swamplands I am terribly concerned now
@@Mordecrox flee immediately
@@airgin3000not OP but my brother had one. Layed its eggs on a mosquito and he got bit, egg fell in and a week later we noticed something was wrong. We caught it early and pulled it out ourselves with a electronic microscope tweasers and gause+polysporn. We essentially blocked its oxygen and than pulled it out when it’s breathing tube came out.
It was very traumatizing and has spikes to prevent removal via pulling, do not remove them this way unless you catch them VeRY early as even a small one hurt my bother a lot and the process was nasty.
@@normanrainbows2132 it's breathing tube? what do you mean?
Whoa I never thought making a species extinct could be so cool 😎
Smallpox. Species we eradicated on purpose.
@@halycon404 Smallpox is a virus and thus unfortunately cannot be called a 'species' by common convention.
@@halycon404 not eradicated yet though
usually its a bad idea but i guess there are a few rare cases like this
@@halycon404Still exists in a lab. And, I guarantee it's in some carcass in the permafrost.
*Peace was never an option.*
Said humanity to 123 (known) species
FOR THE EMPEROR
I'd heard of botflies but never screwworms, I never imagined there was a creature with less justification for continued existence than ticks (beaten narrowly by mosquitos), but here we are.
Mosquitos are actually very important for the ecosystem since birds and bats feed on them, along with frogs and a number of fish and other amphibians.
I don't know the intricacies but I imagine that just because things eat them doesn't mean that they can't or don't also eat other things.
@@bud389plus there is a species that eats other mosquitoes
@@bud389 nah, but think of it this way. If mosquitos didn't exist, then we could have more fish and frog, and an equal or slightly smaller amount of birds. The only consequence is reduced biodiversity, but the number still positively trade, overall. I wouldn't move this argument too much past this point, because that's a slippery slope in the making, but I think it can clearly work to some degree.
@@tumultoustortelliniwhere are you getting that estimation?
Screwworms are gonna have us humans sounding like daleks.
"Exterminate, ExTermiNAte, EXTERMINATE"
*“I AM YOUR ENEMY, I AM YOUR ENEMY”*
Hey this is legit and not based on misguided mainstream pseudoscience. I'm down for this initiative.
Yup, it was a two minute YT vid after all.
@@ano_nym I mean, he had a board of fancy notes and chemicals after all. Do you have a white board filled with notes and doodles?
"misguided mainstream pseudoscience" like what? Example
@ano_nym, more importantly, it's from the 80,000 Hours Institute. That's a fairly trustworthy source as far as I'm concerned :p
@@legion999 Just did a quick search and found something interesting. Apparently, minimum parking space law are categorized as pseudoscience since it’s based on assumptions rather than facts. On the other hand, an example I can think of is people thinking MSG is dangerous. It’s just a mixture of salt and glutamate. Glutamate existed in most food we eat daily. MSG is probably healthier than chemical preservatives.
I clicked on this after seeing the headline with the attitude of “these fools, don’t they know what playing God leads to??” And by the end of the two minutes I was like “no no… he’s got a point” 😂
To some degree we're already playing god with the sterile fly drops he mentioned. Tom Scott covered it, but he kind of underplayed the horror of screw worms.
screwworms are good for Natural Population Control, Nutrient Recycling, and as an Indicator of Ecosystem Health
@@stevez5134 none of those are reason enough to keep them around.
God doesn't exist.
@@AJPemberton Why not? That's a bare assertion devoid of evidence
Forgot who the guy was, but a professor / entomologist was in the news because he let a single bottfly larva grow in his arm to full term for his students- it's now part of the collection in the bug vault where the other specimens he caught are recorded.
☹️
Piotr Naskrecki ;) th-cam.com/video/lOaGtz8vRfU/w-d-xo.html
Yet another reason for me NOT to be a teacher! Goodness gracious!
like... first of all - why would anyone do that.
second of all - why can't i have a teacher that does anything helpful for their students?
my teachers just try to fail me 24/7 i swear. this guy is sacrificing his arm for his students entertainment???
I saw that video & it's one of the reasons I won't be sad to die someday.
It makes me so happy that people are dedicating their lives to fix these major problems that I wasn't even aware about.
I had hookworms in my foot before. It was bad. It swelled up real big and i could see all their tracks. Ivermectin fixed it but it was insane
holy shit a person on the internet talking about using ivermectin and it's actually for a valid medical use case, now I've seen everything
You took the forbidden horse dewormer!? But the science told me that's livestock medicine!
@@t_c5266 Ivermectin is an FDA approved medication used to treat roundwomrs, threadworms, and more. It's still prescribed. Using the veterinary stuff can be bad because its dosed for a large animal, and it being an agent used to destroy eukaryotic organisms, can have some pretty severe side effects. You can use it safely, if you dose it properly, but it also isn't held up to the same purity standards. Either way, it will work, you just have to be smarter than the average antimasker trying to use a dewormer to prophylactically treat a virus.
@@t_c5266The anti-parasitic stopped parasites 🤯 What will science lie to us about next? 🙄
@@t_c5266Not just that, he took the dewormer for -- gasp -- _deworming!_ Modern medicine truly has lost its way.
I have experience with bot flies in Costa Rica. They got in my dog a couple times and squeezing them out was awful. My ex father in law down there got some in his shoulder and he wouldn't let me pop them out, the pharmacies there are used to removing them. They're called "torcilo" in Costa Rica and they're common anywhere that has cows.
Hello, I'm from the Perez Zeledón area, so i pronounce it as "torsalo", we got screwworms here already, The difference is that they are smaller and you will find like 15 or 25 on the same spot, we call em "guano barrenador", terrible, now you have to spend more on high quality ivermectin to keep the cattle healthy.
0:14 It feeds indiscriminately on worm-blooded things.
Sounds like the government.
Warm*
@@Lulz1356 That's the joke.
@@halholland1637 The US government literally prevents it in North America.
I mean, segmented *warms* (annelids) are the first animal species to evolve blood.
Exterminatus
The Emperor Protects
@@Markyparky56unless your the one being exterminatused…
@@sullentamp9140we never had a choice in the first place
_smashes big red button with face_
Harry Potter
We must stop the tyranids we have at home. The tyranids at home:
A friend of mine was involved in the screw worm irradiation program here in Florida, a really amazing story.
It must have gone well, as a FL native I've never even heard of one here.
That's a terrible idea, they're bad enough as it is, we don't need them radioactive...
I've heard people say mosquitos should be wiped out, but I've long suspected too many species -- frogs, fish, other insects, etc. -- feed on them. Eradicating the screwworm though... that's something I can get behind.
I don't think any mosquito predators rely entirely or even mainly on these insects for food. So long as any attempt to eradicate them didn't harm other insect species, I believe there would be very few negatives.
As with the above; mosquitos are not a staple to the diets of anything that prey upon them, and even tend to harm everything they prey upon as well as occasionally their own predators. Mosquitos spread diseases to even species which eat them (by being quick vectors for diseases to spread into epidemics) with no time to evolve defences against, essentially meaning that they're an ecological time-bomb even where they are seemingly fitting into a 'natural balance'.
@AJPemberton Also, it turns out that it's only 2 or 3 species of mosquito that transmit malaria, and even then, mostly the females older than breeding age.
There was one experiment a while back to alter the mosquito's genes or something to make the females die after laying eggs, and thus stop malaria without making the mosquito's extinct.
The ones that bite us and spread malaria are only a few species of many thousands iirc
@@AJPemberton most animals survive food-wise by rather close margins. Even if they're not a main food source they could still be a life or death difference for many animals, + they have a unique role in the ecosystem that no other creature has or can fill. Probably a bad idea to wipe them out altogether.
Living with Britain's bland flora and fauna has its benefits.
Have you heard of the poison garden? Plenty of native plant species that can seriously harm or kill you that probably grow near you
Very true. We have a small crowded island, but the worst things here are some of the people.
@@VyantQuijt yeah that's why we don't eat random things.
@@VyantQuijt we do also have a maximum of 3 poisonous snake species, but the scarcity is really the selling point
I know adder bites can be bad, but mostly are a concern for nosey pets unless you habitually hike without ankle protection.
Not aware of any other poisonous snakes, guessing those zany Victorians decided to keep things interesting by importing some fresh new nightmares from elsewhere again.
I don't think I've ever had a personal opinion formed as quickly as this.
I used to be terrified of bot flies back when I lived in Nicaragua. I'm not sure how reasonable a fear that was.
Its okay, Mitch! It's not like there are tiny fish that will jump into your urethra while peeing. You only have to worry about fish like Candirú in the Amazon rainforest!
@@MagnumCartaNot if some freak releases it in another place in the US. Invasives species be wild.
@@MagnumCarta WTF
@@MagnumCarta it's never been proven that's ever happened though. It appears to have been only a local urban legend as no known cases have ever been found.
If ever you've seen those botfly removal videos you'd understand how terrible things can be being infected with them
If you haven't ever seen those botfly larva removal videos...don't.
@@Kyle-vg2io I have zero intention of seeing one of those but thanks for the heads up
@@Kyle-vg2io This is one of the few times I’ve seen someone say “If you don’t know what this is, don’t find out” and actually listened. My morbid curiosity is not strong enough today.
nah im looking this up brb
Ok, so? That doesn't mean we should get rid of them
"I have known you for 2 minutes and i hate you with my entire being."
Me to screwworms.
Screwworms are gonna get screwed.
I thought mosquitos were ass but let's get ruin the life of this thing first
These things are typically delivered by mosquitoes, that's how they find hosts
So they're just as bad imo
Mosquitos at least have an ecological purpose, they feed bats; birds and fish
@@k24532 They are not
@@Rixoli that niche could easily be opened up for other species to fill
@@k24532 they are delivered by botflies, did you not watch the video?
This was compelling and terrifying
I really enjoyed your delivery and pacing, and the summary analogy really hit well and made a lot of sense; thank you for sharing!
What he doesn’t mention is that there’s never a single screwworm in a wound when the fly drops eggs. Those hellspawns always come in groups
GMOs at their finest!! There are efforts to do this with invasive mosquitoes that spread malaria, West Nile and zika. People balk at the term "GMO" but don't know what it really means and how much genetic engineering has and will continue to help the world.
I think we should create lil nano bots to fight em and it’ll be like pacific rim on a microscopic level
This is an actual declaration of war.
Where's the GoFundMe/Kickstarter for this?
The IRS, apparently.
It only costs the US gov't $15 million to maintain the "solid wall of sterile screworms" that he mentioned in the video. That's an *extremely* small amount of money for the US federal gov't (I would know, I read government budget documents for fun).
If you live in the US, are a US citizen, or know anyone who is, write (or ask them) to write to a Congressman asking for this program to be expanded further into South America. (I imagine the best way forward would be to start from the Southern tip - Tierra del Fuego - and move up north until the screworm eradication zone meets the Panama barrier.
A grateful Gates and P-fizer have seen this and have a team working round the clock. Expect an announcement from the WHO soon
@@grimbleahoyoh dear 🤦
@@grimbleahoy I know you're joking, but I'd be actually happy about that. They aren't the correct team for it, but I'm sure they could hire someone onto the firm who is.
@@grimbleahoythis, but unironically.
0:07: Thats easy for you to say !
When my Pa was was young back in Fl 100 years ago, he lost a wonderful horse from one scratch on his neck
He had to help dip cattle every year
This is such a compelling elevator pitch, I am 100% invested in getting this done.
A good and concise presentation. Very well done!
I cast a curse of a thousand years upon the TH-cam algorithm for revealing the knowledge of the screwworms existence to me on this day.
Well that's a terrible thing that has no right to exist.
I get that a lot.
Don't talk about Boris Johnson like that!
When I was in America around 30 years ago I got botfly, I simply drank so much alcohol including absinthe that they could not wait to get out my skin, like woke up in a drunken mess with blood and pus on sheets and bot maggots trying to get away from my body. I think Absinth was never a drink but a medicine.
Wormwood in absinthe is a vermifuge. Aka "internal bug" killer, and has been used that way for a few millennia apparently.
It's the controversial ingredient supposedly making it "hallucinogenic" (not possible in normal drinking amounts or even a few bottles btw). And was banned for a while because a drunk that killed his family blamed the specific drink to get a lighter sentence, it caused mass hysteria after the trial.
Read the vid title: "What in the f*** is this dude going on about?"
Listened to the vid: "This MF spittin'!"
Screwworms listening to the vid: "We wildin"
The unfortunate thing is that there is always so much resistance to any sort of project to modify an ecosystem or run geoengineering projects, even when they are for a humane, ethical, or even vital reason.
We have already changed the world enough to cause environmental instability in some ecosystems, we have a responsibility to use our technology to correct it and make things better. In this case, the available cattle made things a lot worse because the worm could breed from them.We are far beyond the point where it's fine to just avoid any further impacts and let nature do it's own thing.
Before cattle there were other large mammals that it fed from.
Perhaps there was a period where humans causing American (both North and South) megaforna to die off reduced food before cattle refilled that niche but without humans the fly would have plenty of food.
You do realize you're saying we should give up, right? Almost everything we've intentionally done to ecosystems has negatively impacted biodiversity in some way.
When it's something like these worms it's easy to agree to make them disappear, but what about the rest ?
What happens when you give corporations the control of nature's ressources ?
What if they can't be found naturally anymore ? The seeds, the plants, the fruits, the animals, the water sources etc...
What if they become "corrupted" somehow ?
Nature has never done it's own thing, all those pesky little critters within nature such as ourselves do 'our' own thing.
Nature itself is just a small set of basic rules: Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten.
its kinda like how irrational enviormentalism can actually hurt real enviornmental issues, like how people being paranoid about nuclear power has legitimately set back decarbonization decades and has had countries like germany basically go back to coal and oil again because they got rid of nuclear plants.
I never knew i wanted to eradicate a species i hadnt heard of to this day
1:05 A biological barrier of radiologically sterilized flies is so metal
It's a blowfly, not a botfly, botflies are from the Oestridae family. Not every fly that has maggots that eat live flesh are botflies.
Wanted to mention this.
Are the TH-cam comments filled with blowflies or botflies?
And he's an MIT trained biologist. I guess MIT isn't too good with Life Sciences huh? This is irresponssible of him.
Maybe he misspoke? Sometimes when you get passionate about something, you forget how to use words correctly.
@@MagnumCartaunderrated comment
I thought they were called screwworms because they are screwciating.
If they go extinct, they'll be ex-screwciating.
they used to be, but now they are exscrewciating
@@david7384 lol
Knowledge that is valuable yet something I wish I didn't know
"If screw worms are 'God's creatures' then why do you complain when I send them to him?"
-This guy probably
"If God wanted you to live, He would not have created ME!"
"Sir, it's not God they're going to"
You're a good teacher and interesting to listen to. Cheers
Screwworms watching this sweating and crying rn
Wow thanks. Really needed this. Definitely won't get paranoid about this at all
I could see John Green getting behind something like this.
I'm sure he would support it. He might decide to keep his personal focus on TB though. His dedication to that cause is legendary!
As soon as he said it's a botfly I was already on board
“Every organism is important” mfs when i show them this:
You've convinced me.
Screw the worms.
Uruguay mentioned
Thank you, random video in my recommended list, for revealing to me a new horror that will haunt my nightmares!
That's an interesting perspective. When it comes to animal welfare, we don't generally consider shit nature does, no matter what we might be able to do about it or how horrendous the suffering it causes animals is. It's only really disturbing to us if humans are the ones doing it.
If animals want rights, they'd damn better have responsibilities, I say ;)!
@@VestinVestin A chicken's responsibility is to get in mah belly.
@@chickenlover657 You guys know God made us vegan and you're probably going to Hell when you die, right? Genesis 1:29.
I suppose because we know humans can whether or not to cause harm.
An animal can't really make that choice.
Good and evil depends on the choices made, if a being can't make a choice, or understand said choice, then it doesn't commit evil.
I personally think you gotta respect all animals. They are cogs in a machine just like us
I believe this man is very very intelligent. The pace at which he describes things combined with the concise and understandable vocabulary tells me he really is just that smart, and not pretending. That is insane.
If we never play God, how will we ever get good at it?
This is extremely terrifying, thank you.
Animals: thanks Satan!
Satan: Don't look at me. I may be the ruler of Hell who torments sinners for all eternity but I have sweet spot for critters. This abomination is either from the man upstairs or Cthulhu. And I know Cthulhu well enough to say he would only use these things on humans.
Your world is so simple it's kind cute how ridiculous it is.
Everything good: God
Everything not good: Satan.
Source of this information? God, supposedly.
I call that a biased source. ;)
Whoooosh
This sounds personal. Its is for me now after seeing this
They drill their way into flesh and devour it? Sounds like my mother in law!
😅
Oh yeah? Well my MIL devours souls!
Lmfao
badumm tsss
That's hot
To kill a screw worm or screw a kill worm? That is the question.
We need a genetic screw driver!
Tell Crowdstrike to write the driver code!
Jesus, where can I donated to help this mega project.
Take ma money
Does this channel present anything on Chagas parisitism?
It's treatable at early stagesm at early agesm but currently kills about 12,000 per year in South America, and there are estimated to be millions who are infected, but don't show easily-detected symptoms; sadly, many will suffer from nervous system or cardiac problems that might be attributed to other causes. Given the high rate of infections, and its possible transmission congenitally, or through blood transfusion, it's probably a 'useful' idea to have screening of South American immigrants, not as any form of 'discrimination', but to establish whether they are infected, and/or treatable, and to establish a level of control of its transmission.
Very interesting! you also make a very good argument for the case. What are the unintended consequences?
imagine if the flood exists
this guy would grab a needler and run into it
Nice halo reference
TIL that what we call "berne" here in my region of southeast Brasil (rural), is called screwworm. I know multiple people that have had them, ALL my dogs have had them, and to be honest, it's not as bad as you say, like, no one i knew took morphine, they just felt "stinging and biting" and i can easily remove them from my dogs, just by pinching them like you would pop a zit. Just gotta be careful not to burst them, or the wound will get infected by the dead screw worm inside ( if you can't remove the dead worm with pincers that is). But I've never had dogs or animals die from them. You usually either get them out yourself or just spray "silver spray" on the wound to kill the worm.
It freaking sucks, you gotta watch out when your resting outside for flies like these.
This doesn't happen in large cities tho. If i told someone in the city this, they wouldn't believe me.
BUT, if there was an animal i could totally eradicate, it would be fleas and ticks (mainly fleas) Those are the real pests... If Berne was our biggest problems, damn, I'd be happy.
Silver spray .... you don't mean quicksilver the thing that makes people insane ah mercury do people use mercury to kill these screw worms
I thought "screwworm" was some kind of office lingo.
Two minutes prior, I had never heard of a “screw worm.” Now, this guy’s got me grabbing the can of 99% DEET spray as I realize that we can’t expect God to do all the work.
Incidentally causing animal species to go extinct: cringe
Deliberately causing the extinction of animal species for our own benefit: unfathomably based
I need to know more about this living wall of sterile screwworms in Panama
I clicked on this video thinking screw worm was a new term for f**kboy
Somebody called me that once and I was so confused, not knowing what it means.
what’d you make of the grinning scientist in thumbnail
I thought Austin Burt came up with the gene drive. He told me about it when I was an undergrad ~1990. We discussed its potential application in malaria vector control.
Careful of utilitarist integrals. If you don't discount things happening in the future, all your integrals are undefined (infinite area both above and below the x-axis, increasing uncertainty, bla). If you do discount the far future, what discount function are you using? Different ones will produce vastly different results.
I can't say I'm a fan of screw worms, but that kind of calculation scares me, because it can be used to justify anything by cherry picking the effects you are calculating and the ones you aren't.
ngl, you already got me at "the man devourer"
Thanks for the numerical comparison of impact. I think we all struggle to get an absolute appreciation of anything over say 10^6 so direct comparison with another ‘harm’ is very helpful!
The calculations are inaccurate unfortunately.
Damn great argument
We destroyed our most powerful weapon with Ipads
Brain?
@@digestiveissue7710 Kids
The amount of botfly larva I’ve seen on tiny little creatures in them animal rehabilitation videos is so devastating. There’s usually so many them on creatures that are only slightly bigger than my hands little baby animals, it’s so painful to watch🥺
I agree with most of this, but not the math used against factory farming. You use 10^6 years * 10^9 animals/year for screwworms, but then 100 years * 10^13 factory farmed animals. Why? It'd make sense if we expected 10^6 more years of screwworms, and only 100 more years of factory farming (after which both would stop), but that seems overly optimistic wrt factory farming to me, I don't think we're stopping that anytime soon. Without good info on when either would stop, the only thing that actually matters here is the rate (which would leave factory farming as 10000x worse).
Horror movie producers should definitely have this guy in their contacts... He'd be a unique asset both in plot development and when pitching movie studios🤣
For those who have never seen the horror of screwworm infestation on a living animal, especially deer, it is hands down one of the absolute most gruesome sights you will ever witness and it will leave you with the heebee jeebees that will haunt you for days or possibly weeks!!! Look up pics of it of deer in Florida that get infected when a big storm blows some in from below Panama!! You won’t forget it ever!!
The first time I saw it was an infected squirrel a decade ago, That was enough to give me nightmares to this dat
I am definitely NOT going to look...
Prokhor Zaharov approves of this message.
"Let the Gaians preach their silly religion, but one way or the other I shall see this compound burned, seared, and sterilized until every hiding place is found and until every last Mind Worm egg, every last slimy one, has been cooked to a smoking husk. That species shall be exterminated, I tell you! Exterminated!"
-(BTW, we already use genetic engineering to create malaria-transfering mosquitos that become infertile on the next generation. It's been years ago, I think I need to read about the results)- nope, it's still theorised about, also, non-malaria-transfering mosquitos were created recently
"That species will be exterminated, I tell you! Exterminated!"
Are these different than the maggots which eat dead flesh and possibly stop infection?
1:59 that's some wonky math
Comparing a million years to 100 years and saying it's two orders of magnitude more devastating? Sure, if you ignore the other four orders of magnitude.
I think the reason for the different time frames is that he assumes factory farming will cease within 100 years no matter what--if not for animal welfare reasons, then for environmental or economic reasons.
@@PopeGoliath to put it another way, letting these things continue to exist for the averge natural lifespan of a species is equal in damage to 10,000 years of modern artificial animal farming. I think that’s a better, clearer way of describing the idea with the same figures he’s using.
@@nathagar9251 That's better. I had no idea what he was originally saying. Combined with his jarring editing it seemed like a stupidly big leap.
Obviously I’d need to know more, see the studies and evidence (or at least trust that smarter people than me did the work), but I’m sold on the premise!
He says wounds, but that doesn't let you know how terrifying they really are. A wound as small as a tick bite, is enough for a botfly to lay their eggs.
I got a video recommended right while i was watching this that talks about the panama flies, watching that next
How are you going to compare 1 million years of screwworm existence to 100 years of farming lol. The apples to apples comparison should be over the same time span. Otherwise nice video.
see i didn't realize from the title that screwworms were botflies but the moment you brought up the latter i was onboard immediately
Ah, science. Always knows best, never sees the unforeseen.
Well, theres a new phobia.