18-year-old Jacob Egington probably won't pick up seashells at the beach anymore, after the level of such a shell almost cost him his life. ChatGPT helped us bring this disturbing case.
Egington was bathing in the sea off the coast of Shawlwater near Perth, Western Australia, when he came across a shell and picked it up. He was on his way to show the shell to his baby niece, who was on the beach with the rest of the family, when he suddenly noticed a tiny blue creature hiding inside the shell. He dropped the shell from his hand and noticed a tiny bite wound on his leg. The wound did not hurt, but soon he began to feel unwell, and was evacuated by paramedics to the nearest hospital – where doctors struggled for 6 hours to save his life.
Combing the beach for shells has almost cost a Perth teenager his life. The 18 year old didn't realise he had picked up a deadly sea creature. @JerrieDemasi #7NEWS pic.twitter.com/rvDwW94mWj
— 7NEWS Perth (@7NewsPerth) December 4, 2023
That tiny undercover traveler was one of the most venomous creatures in the world—the blue-ringed octopus. This family includes four subspecies that, despite their tiny size, possess a very powerful poison called tetrodotoxin. It is a neurotoxin that can quickly paralyze organs and systems in the body, and can also kill humans. What makes creatures particularly dangerous is that not only do they produce the deadly poison – they don't even have to bite the victim to harm him. This is because the poison is stored in all their glands, so any accidental touch to their body can be fatal.
The poison of the blue-ringed octopus has no known cure, and apparently only by luck have three human sacrifices been recorded so far of these small but dangerous animals, which live in the oceans of Oceania, especially on the coasts of Australia and Japan. However, several people who encountered these creatures survived to tell about it: in 2004, a 4-year-old boy was almost killed after touching such an octopus, and experienced severe symptoms before he began to recover; And last March, a woman who was stung twice by a blue-ringed octopus also survived. Jacob is also expected to recover from the severe bite.
It is interesting to note that despite the large number of highly poisonous animals roaming the world, apart from snakes and scorpions, none of the ten most dangerous animals in terms of the number of people who die because of them per year kills with venom. Most dangerous animals are tiny animals that carry deadly diseases, while others kill with their strong teeth.
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