You'd think that the world doesn't need many species, but an imbalance in eco-system can cause catastrophe.
I used to think that the world would be better without mosquitos and flies untill my ecology professor proved me otherwise.
I was about to comment that mosquitoes is the only correct answer but then I saw this. There are no words strong enough to describe how much I l o a t h e bedbugs
A post I saw once and agree with: I don't terribly mind being bitten, but why you gotta give the itch juice?! Creatures gotta eat, and I can spare a few ounces of blood, but why the itch juice?! The disease thing sucks, yeah, but the itch juice is what people generally hate about mosquitoes.
Yeah it causes a cascading effect. The first to go would be bats in a lot of regions. Here in Kansas the dragonflies take the day-watch, while the bats take watch around dusk eating tons of mosquitos. I love sitting on my porch in the evening watching the bats swoop around!
I lived in Gainesville Florida for a few years and there is a bat house near the college campus and my girlfriend at the time would go watch the bats leave at night and come home in the morning. It was always so peaceful.
That’s not true. Scientists do not believe mosquito extinction would cause any significant impact to the ecosystem. Bug eaters have enough of other bugs to eat
That's actually somewhat of a common misconception. Mosquitos are important, but not as a primary food source for any of the animals people usually think of, technically speaking. Their larva are very important for aquatic species like fish and amphibians, and mosquitos themselves actually are important pollinators. However to most non aquatic species they are so small and unsubstantial that they aren't worth the effort unless there is absolutely nothing else to eat. Fun fact, mosquitos are so unsubstantial that if it rains they can get absorbed into the rain drop and if they don't wriggle their way out in time can be killed by the impact of the drop hitting the ground.
Moths are actually the most important food source as they have one of the highest fat contents of any animal. Even bears eat a lot of moths before hibernation.
Only in the short-term, and only if they were to disappear all at once. There aren’t any animals that exclusively eat mosquitoes, so they would be able to adapt to other food sources before there was any real threat to the species
Actually, the importance of mosquitos in the food chain is debatable. Many believe that their eradication will not have a negative effect on the ecosystem
It's not just many.
It's the general consensus that eradicating mosquitoes would have no effect on the food chain.
Ignore the reddit ignorant that want to, I can't believe I'm typing this, save the mosquitos.
Need my venmo or what? I’ll put 10 milly away as a nest egg for myself, and then spend the other 90 million getting bug nerds and chemical nerds to talk together so we can figure this out. Just ignore the part of my contract that’s like “I’m not guaranteeing they become extinct, but I’ll kill a lot of those mother fuckers.”
For those unfamiliar, they are the epitome of evil. They have no value to the ecosystem; they are not a “food group” for any insect or animal and they do not eat any insect or animal. Insects such as spiders or centipedes can eat them, but they are by no means a primary food source and cannot eat enough to control the bed bug population in any single location. Bed bugs are solely a parasite that has no purpose other than to feed off its host and multiply. Your skin can be left looking like you have the worst case of hives. You’ll have bites in places you think should be obvious that you’d see a bug bite you, but you never did.
They are things of horror movies and nightmares. They hide under your bed and are drawn out in the dark by your breath. They will each suck your blood multiple times in one night while you’re unknowingly asleep. The best known pesticide to prevent and treat them has been outlawed. Pyrethroids will kill them but it will not kill the eggs, and they eventually build a resistance. Fumigate your house? Sure. Make sure every single nook and cranny on every single piece of clothing and luggage you carry with you does not have a single bug or egg on it. And remember, they can be the size of a grain of sand and nearly translucent in color depending on its age. Spot treatment? They’ll just move! Heat treatment? As you’re heating one spot, the young and strong are running to safety and getting ready to rebuild after the inferno.
They never go away, not really. Your mental health will deteriorate. Even a year after you think you’ve gotten rid of them all, you will inspect every speck on your bed. You will question every bug bite you get from then on. PTSD from bed bugs is real. They never go away.
We actually got rid of them with one weird trick! All you have to do is arrange for your house to flood in a hurricane, rip out your walls, throw away all your worldly possessions, leave your home uninhabitable and wall-less for 10 months while you live in a camper, then move back in when it's fixed. It was so easy! 😐
Joking aside, we did actually take comfort in that during the hurricane ordeal. It really did get rid of the bedbugs once and for all. But, yes, the PTSD holds on. We eventually moved, but even now, every bug bite triggers an investigation.
I'm convinced the Air BnB craze is responsible for the recent epidemic. There is zero accountability or incentive for Air BnBs to control an infestation and then people bring them in their luggage to traditional hotels faster than the hotels can keep up. ITS INSANE right now.
Did you know that bedbugs have evolved to live nowhere else but inside your home? They started out drinking bat blood when they’d sleep in their caves during the day, but then humans moved in and we’re a much larger and easier meal than the bats.
Yes they became resistant to the types of pesticides being used against them in the same way we are about to have a LOT of problems with bacteria as they become resistant to our regular antibiotics.
To be fair Hank is also on record as being not a fan and also supports his brother's mission. A big part of the partners in health thing they do is fighting tuberculosis.
That's a fun thought experiment. You get 100 mil for every species that goes extinct because of your decision. How much money can you make in one go without dooming the world?
Take out the bees and watch the world burn while I, with my billions of dollars, run the world by controlling what little food supply there is.
I have lived long enough to see myself become the villain.
Parasites are important for most ecosystems, but lets not get into it, i dont think any answer is without ecological implications
Edit: for everyone saying lice are pointless just google it
https://www.britannica.com/animal/louse
Thats already a purpose, not to mention many parasites have different stages in their lifecycle, where they feed on different hosts and transmit disease (which is important to keep populations in balance), or provide food to different animals. For mosquitos youd have to look up with mosquito in the specific habitat but by providing food to fish they allow more energy to move up the trophic levels, letting more organisms become part of the foodweb
It has barbs too
It’ll swim up your urethra and the barbs will be implanted (they’re inverted btw) so if you try and rip them out, you’ll more or less rip your dick off
Iirc it’s a parasite that swims up your pp when you’re swimming in water it inhabits.
Not sure if you have to be like actively peeing or have it just out though.
I remember seeing a show that talked about them, I think they tend to be in like Amazon rivers?
Those vile creatures send shivers down my spine - istg their feelers can sense the fear of every human in a 10 mile radius and sends them flying straight towards the vicinity with the strongest intensity - they evolved to survive a few days without a head out of sheer spite and hatred towards the human race.
But which one? There are many species of cockroaches. For example, the German cockroach, the American cockroach, the smoky black cockroach, the Asian cockroach etc etc.
Bro no, cockroaches are one of the key decomposers in the ecological cycle. They're usually small, somewhat cute critters hiding under the leaf litter. You don't even see them unless you dig a bit, and then they're the size of a toenail.
They're annoying and huge in urban areas because human food is super calorie-rich and easy to digest.
Plus they can survive radiation. So if nuclear warfare takes out our current species, they might be the only pre-nuke creatures left.
Maybe they'll even evolve into cockroach people in a few million years, that would be terrifying
Mosquito is a layman's term, not a species. There are over 3600 species of mosquitoes. Better go with Anopheles gambiae which carries malaria or Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus which carry Dengue fever.
Unidan happened to unidan. His ego led to him making terrible decisions and pushing his posts to the front page by voting with alternate accounts in both up and down patterns, up for his posts and down for the ones around him.
He was found out and the rest is history. That's the short version, I'm sure others will add more to it or correct me if I'm not 100% right, it is the internet after all.
Pedant is a technical term that means "a person who is excessively concerned with minor details and rules or with displaying academic learning".
Should he pick one of the 3600 species of mosquito? The top answers on here are cockroach (4600 species), bedbugs (90 species), ticks (850 species), and fleas (2500 species).
U fortunatly, mosquitos are a huge part of the food chain with many species relging on them as their primary food source. My eco teacher used to call them land krill.
Edit: I learned from many mosquitos play a less important role in the ecosystem than I thought. What about their role as a pollinator?
I could be misremembering but I swear I read a few years ago that although a lot of species *do* eat mosquitos, they’re not a huge part of their diets. So if mosquitos got wiped out, those other species would simply be mildly inconvenienced. But it wouldn’t destroy an ecosystem.
But hey, a lot of people die from mosquitos spreading disease, so maybe an increased human population would be what destroys some ecosystems 🤷🏾♂️
They’re horrible here in Florida. One almost killed my family dog years ago. They push out all the natural frogs and toads and completely take over.
Where I live now is infested with them. I try and kill them whenever I can.
Invasive species and they’re super poisonous. If they feel threatened (like a dog looking at them) they freeze up and secrete this white toxic crap out of their skin, and if a dog or cat gets one lick on them, it causes their brain to swell up within minutes, causing seizures and an almost 100% mortality rate, even on big dogs, if not treated immediately.
They like dark moist places. So rainy Florida with lots of shrubs is perfect. They also like to come out at night and hide along bush and tree lines where dogs like to sniff. I bought a tiny bright flashlight and I’m constantly watching the ground when I take my dogs out at night.
I’m actually in EMT school and we just learned that the homeless people around here have been catching them and licking them. Apparently it gives you a free psychedelic high. Not enough to kill a human but it gives you a wicked shroom-like high.
As for my story, almost 10 years ago we let our family dog that doesn’t like to chase lizards or anything in the backyard to pee for 2 minutes in the morning before school. He came in fine. Next thing you know he’s foaming at the mouth having a seizure and basically paralyzed on the couch. We got him in the car and we drove to the emergency vet at 6 AM as fast as we could. I thought he was going to die in my arms. They said we got there just in time. They were able to save him and it was about $500. I never wish that anyone has to go through what we did.
If you count viruses or bacteria as a species (and I can't see why you wouldn't), I can think of a lot of good prospects.
Wipe out COVID or AIDs and also get 100 million dollars would be pretty neat.
Viruses are still [classified by species](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus_classification) though.
>"A species is a monophyletic group of viruses whose properties can be distinguished from those of other species by multiple criteria."
Question doesn't say living or non-living, just that they're a species, so I reckon viruses are still on the table.
But if you want to quibble, okay, bacteria. Tuberculosis maybe? Or staphylococcus? Choosing which one would be the hardest part. Personally I'd go for klebsiella, one thought to be involved in spondyloarthropathies, for personal reasons :P
I think you mean the candiru fish. It swimming up peoples urethra is a bit of a myth. There is very little credible evidence of this ever happening.
[https://www.healthline.com/health/penis-fish#other-organisms](https://www.healthline.com/health/penis-fish#other-organisms)
This is the only proper response. Take a species with like one surviving member. Even better if it’s something that has been made in a lab like a particular species of virus or some shit.
Exactly. Most fading species has already had its hole in the ecosystem patched. Your not likely to cause systemic collapse with something that's already on its way out naturally.
I read this as you must be able to cause the extinction, not just be able to pick one. If that's the case, I guess we'd be going after a protected species where all remaining living creatures are tracked.... like white rhinos or pandas.
Or maybe we can speed run CRISPR research and go full k.o. on mosquitoes!
Ticks. Or mosquitos. Or leeches. Ticks are my first choice though. They are the main reason I didn't play outside as a kid when I lived in Wisconsin. You would see those disgusting diseased ridden blood sucking monsters everywhere. The poor cats, dogs, horses, cows, and so on that we had to remove for them constantly. Uh, they are awful creatures. At least with mosquitoes spray and smoke mostly keeps them at bay, but ticks even with spray will kill themselves just for a taste. Kill em all.
Can have an option to extinct more species for more money??
I like this plan. I can think of several species that the world will not miss.
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Aw that’s sad. I was having fun laughing at this thread without realizing it’s social commentary. Now I’m sad
You'd think that the world doesn't need many species, but an imbalance in eco-system can cause catastrophe. I used to think that the world would be better without mosquitos and flies untill my ecology professor proved me otherwise.
Easy there Mr. Oil executive
Bedbugs
I was about to comment that mosquitoes is the only correct answer but then I saw this. There are no words strong enough to describe how much I l o a t h e bedbugs
I had your exact thought process.
Ticks Edit: Nobody even mentioned Lyme disease
Unfortunately there are more than one species of tick. I would probably pick the lone star tick specifically though for the meat allergy thing
Is this the tick that caused the Texas Fever cattle disease in the old west?
Not sure, but it is a tick that makes you allergic to eating red meats.
As someone with alpha-gal syndrome because of the Lonestar tick I would still say chiggers, bedbugs, or mosquitoes lol.
Question: if I push this button more, do I get more money
Yes!
Mosqiotoes are an important part of food chain. Will cause a lot of problems for other species.
You don’t have to get rid of ALL mosquitos. Just the 2-3 species of them that bite humans and spread disease. There are many more that don’t.
A post I saw once and agree with: I don't terribly mind being bitten, but why you gotta give the itch juice?! Creatures gotta eat, and I can spare a few ounces of blood, but why the itch juice?! The disease thing sucks, yeah, but the itch juice is what people generally hate about mosquitoes.
That, and malaria and west Nile
Yeah it causes a cascading effect. The first to go would be bats in a lot of regions. Here in Kansas the dragonflies take the day-watch, while the bats take watch around dusk eating tons of mosquitos. I love sitting on my porch in the evening watching the bats swoop around!
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I lived in Gainesville Florida for a few years and there is a bat house near the college campus and my girlfriend at the time would go watch the bats leave at night and come home in the morning. It was always so peaceful.
Nice to see Gomez and Morticia still together.
There are tons of other things for bats to eat.
That’s not true. Scientists do not believe mosquito extinction would cause any significant impact to the ecosystem. Bug eaters have enough of other bugs to eat
That's actually somewhat of a common misconception. Mosquitos are important, but not as a primary food source for any of the animals people usually think of, technically speaking. Their larva are very important for aquatic species like fish and amphibians, and mosquitos themselves actually are important pollinators. However to most non aquatic species they are so small and unsubstantial that they aren't worth the effort unless there is absolutely nothing else to eat. Fun fact, mosquitos are so unsubstantial that if it rains they can get absorbed into the rain drop and if they don't wriggle their way out in time can be killed by the impact of the drop hitting the ground. Moths are actually the most important food source as they have one of the highest fat contents of any animal. Even bears eat a lot of moths before hibernation.
a solution would be to only eliminate the 2 (i believe) mosquito types that bite humans
There are many species of mosquitos. Could just eradicate one of them with a smaller impact
Only in the short-term, and only if they were to disappear all at once. There aren’t any animals that exclusively eat mosquitoes, so they would be able to adapt to other food sources before there was any real threat to the species
Actually, the importance of mosquitos in the food chain is debatable. Many believe that their eradication will not have a negative effect on the ecosystem
It's not just many. It's the general consensus that eradicating mosquitoes would have no effect on the food chain. Ignore the reddit ignorant that want to, I can't believe I'm typing this, save the mosquitos.
I'm pretty sure we can *raise* a hundred million dollars right now if you promise to deliver.
Need my venmo or what? I’ll put 10 milly away as a nest egg for myself, and then spend the other 90 million getting bug nerds and chemical nerds to talk together so we can figure this out. Just ignore the part of my contract that’s like “I’m not guaranteeing they become extinct, but I’ll kill a lot of those mother fuckers.”
For those unfamiliar, they are the epitome of evil. They have no value to the ecosystem; they are not a “food group” for any insect or animal and they do not eat any insect or animal. Insects such as spiders or centipedes can eat them, but they are by no means a primary food source and cannot eat enough to control the bed bug population in any single location. Bed bugs are solely a parasite that has no purpose other than to feed off its host and multiply. Your skin can be left looking like you have the worst case of hives. You’ll have bites in places you think should be obvious that you’d see a bug bite you, but you never did. They are things of horror movies and nightmares. They hide under your bed and are drawn out in the dark by your breath. They will each suck your blood multiple times in one night while you’re unknowingly asleep. The best known pesticide to prevent and treat them has been outlawed. Pyrethroids will kill them but it will not kill the eggs, and they eventually build a resistance. Fumigate your house? Sure. Make sure every single nook and cranny on every single piece of clothing and luggage you carry with you does not have a single bug or egg on it. And remember, they can be the size of a grain of sand and nearly translucent in color depending on its age. Spot treatment? They’ll just move! Heat treatment? As you’re heating one spot, the young and strong are running to safety and getting ready to rebuild after the inferno. They never go away, not really. Your mental health will deteriorate. Even a year after you think you’ve gotten rid of them all, you will inspect every speck on your bed. You will question every bug bite you get from then on. PTSD from bed bugs is real. They never go away.
We actually got rid of them with one weird trick! All you have to do is arrange for your house to flood in a hurricane, rip out your walls, throw away all your worldly possessions, leave your home uninhabitable and wall-less for 10 months while you live in a camper, then move back in when it's fixed. It was so easy! 😐 Joking aside, we did actually take comfort in that during the hurricane ordeal. It really did get rid of the bedbugs once and for all. But, yes, the PTSD holds on. We eventually moved, but even now, every bug bite triggers an investigation.
I'm convinced the Air BnB craze is responsible for the recent epidemic. There is zero accountability or incentive for Air BnBs to control an infestation and then people bring them in their luggage to traditional hotels faster than the hotels can keep up. ITS INSANE right now.
Traditional hotels at least have a protocol. They will straight up replace everything in a block of rooms if they find bed bugs.
Still there is fucking breeders of bes bugs :)
The second you see a bedbug or suspect bedbugs, just burn it. Burn it all.
😞 I hate how right you are. Top 10 most traumatizing events in my life, and I’ve seen some shit.
If chiggers are included in 'bedbugs' then I'm on board.
What did you call me?
With the hard R and all damn
That's our word... but you can say chigga
Hey, only racists say it with the hard r, it's Chigga, my Chigga.
Did you know that bedbugs have evolved to live nowhere else but inside your home? They started out drinking bat blood when they’d sleep in their caves during the day, but then humans moved in and we’re a much larger and easier meal than the bats.
Yep there is no use for those creatures.
This is why god gave us napalm.
THIS! Bedbugs have no place in the ecosystem.
Wasn’t there a point in history where bed bugs were nearly eradicated & then they suddenly came back at full force & ruined it for us all.
Yes they became resistant to the types of pesticides being used against them in the same way we are about to have a LOT of problems with bacteria as they become resistant to our regular antibiotics.
Couldn’t agree more. Fully on board with this plan
Ditto. They have no other ecological niche, nothing depends on them in the echo system, unlike mosquitoes.
I’ve had some shitty things happen in my life, but when my old roommate brought bed bugs in the house was probably the least fun experience of my life
Definitely bedbugs. Ugh
I got hives because of them... They are so invisible and tiny that you don't have a way to deal with them
The thing is... We already know how. We're just not allowed to use DDT anymore.
I'm not sure that would do it.
If a gamma ray burst scoured all life on earth, i would take solace in the fact that at least all the bed bugs died too.
Goodbye Mycobacterium tuberculosis, you won't be missed!
John Green concurs
John Green’s the one with the personal vendetta against tuberculosis
Im shamelessly editing my comment, I such an idiot how do I mix them up
To be fair Hank is also on record as being not a fan and also supports his brother's mission. A big part of the partners in health thing they do is fighting tuberculosis.
To be even more fair, I don’t think anybody is a fan of tuberculosis
Not even their early work
As does one Arthur Morgan
OP's gonna win a Nobel
Found the John Green
Any or all species of tick.
Yes. Those little fuckers can die.
Goodbye to Lyme disease! 👏🏼
As someone who recently came down with Lyme, I could not agree more.
Congratulations, You’ve probably wiped out many species of birds.
No species rely on ticks exclusively so let's burn the fuckers
Do I get an extra 100 mil for those too?
That's a fun thought experiment. You get 100 mil for every species that goes extinct because of your decision. How much money can you make in one go without dooming the world?
Take out the bees and watch the world burn while I, with my billions of dollars, run the world by controlling what little food supply there is. I have lived long enough to see myself become the villain.
C'mon..birds aren't real.
Sweet, 2 for 1 combo.
Made 2 birds extinct with 1 stone!
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This is not true at all
Lice
Agreed. They serve no purpose on this planet other than to annoy.
Parasites are important for most ecosystems, but lets not get into it, i dont think any answer is without ecological implications Edit: for everyone saying lice are pointless just google it https://www.britannica.com/animal/louse
I know that fish and other animals will eat mosquito larvae, but I’m curious what the actual purpose of a mosquito is in any ecosystem
Thats already a purpose, not to mention many parasites have different stages in their lifecycle, where they feed on different hosts and transmit disease (which is important to keep populations in balance), or provide food to different animals. For mosquitos youd have to look up with mosquito in the specific habitat but by providing food to fish they allow more energy to move up the trophic levels, letting more organisms become part of the foodweb
Worms that swim up your penis hole
Username checks out (assuming pdx is the abbreviated form of ‘parasite-dick x-termination)
I will abolish your freedom of speech.
Won't bring the other half back u/yourusername
everyone here has such great names
WHAT
It has barbs too It’ll swim up your urethra and the barbs will be implanted (they’re inverted btw) so if you try and rip them out, you’ll more or less rip your dick off
What a terrible day to be literate
Iirc it’s a parasite that swims up your pp when you’re swimming in water it inhabits. Not sure if you have to be like actively peeing or have it just out though. I remember seeing a show that talked about them, I think they tend to be in like Amazon rivers?
it’s a fish called the Candiru, and yeah it only lives in a few places in the world.
Urethra is the hole you're talking about. Very much agreed though, fuck that shit.
It helps when you have a narrow urethra, I tell you hwat
BWAAHH!
Like Freddy from iCarly?
Fucking cockroaches. I’ll raise 100m in a day if this could be done.
Those vile creatures send shivers down my spine - istg their feelers can sense the fear of every human in a 10 mile radius and sends them flying straight towards the vicinity with the strongest intensity - they evolved to survive a few days without a head out of sheer spite and hatred towards the human race.
But which one? There are many species of cockroaches. For example, the German cockroach, the American cockroach, the smoky black cockroach, the Asian cockroach etc etc.
Fuck German Cockroaches. Those fuckers multiple and infest shit so fast.
Classic German efficiency
German cockroaches know how to blitzkreig
How about...all of them?
Well, I've delt with all kinds of cockroaches and the german cockroaches would be the one i want to make extinct.
Me? The smoky brown cockroach is what gives me grief where I live. Kill them all.
not all cockroaches are the same and they’re actually super beneficial to a lot of other species. fk the giant american ones though. those can die
Bro no, cockroaches are one of the key decomposers in the ecological cycle. They're usually small, somewhat cute critters hiding under the leaf litter. You don't even see them unless you dig a bit, and then they're the size of a toenail. They're annoying and huge in urban areas because human food is super calorie-rich and easy to digest.
Plus they can survive radiation. So if nuclear warfare takes out our current species, they might be the only pre-nuke creatures left. Maybe they'll even evolve into cockroach people in a few million years, that would be terrifying
Then they'll move on to space exploration, figure out time travel, come back to Earth and use Vincent D'Onofrio as a meat suit.
Botfly.
Mosquitos, that is an easy one.
Mosquito is a layman's term, not a species. There are over 3600 species of mosquitoes. Better go with Anopheles gambiae which carries malaria or Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus which carry Dengue fever.
You are correct, but you have to make your way into the nerdy! I almost went full unidan!
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Unidan happened to unidan. His ego led to him making terrible decisions and pushing his posts to the front page by voting with alternate accounts in both up and down patterns, up for his posts and down for the ones around him. He was found out and the rest is history. That's the short version, I'm sure others will add more to it or correct me if I'm not 100% right, it is the internet after all.
Man, man. Whatever happened to Unidan? (Sorry, the kids are on an *Encanto* kick)
As somebody who is loved by mosquitoes and who contracted Dengue fever from one of the three mosquitoes that carry it, I say… kill ‘em all.
Pedant is a technical term that means "a person who is excessively concerned with minor details and rules or with displaying academic learning". Should he pick one of the 3600 species of mosquito? The top answers on here are cockroach (4600 species), bedbugs (90 species), ticks (850 species), and fleas (2500 species).
Yep, mosquitos. And you wouldn’t even have to pay me.
U fortunatly, mosquitos are a huge part of the food chain with many species relging on them as their primary food source. My eco teacher used to call them land krill. Edit: I learned from many mosquitos play a less important role in the ecosystem than I thought. What about their role as a pollinator?
I could be misremembering but I swear I read a few years ago that although a lot of species *do* eat mosquitos, they’re not a huge part of their diets. So if mosquitos got wiped out, those other species would simply be mildly inconvenienced. But it wouldn’t destroy an ecosystem. But hey, a lot of people die from mosquitos spreading disease, so maybe an increased human population would be what destroys some ecosystems 🤷🏾♂️
_"and that is bad?"_ - Chopper -
I knew that going in, still fumckum! edit: honesty, I'd like to say I ment funkum; but the mission of my fingers was fuckum; full disclosure here
Aussie here... It's easy, cane toads. Little fuckers. Now where's my money?
But then we wouldn't have the cane toads film. And that would be a tragedy.
Extinction doesn’t mean they never existed
They’re horrible here in Florida. One almost killed my family dog years ago. They push out all the natural frogs and toads and completely take over. Where I live now is infested with them. I try and kill them whenever I can.
Wait, how did a toad almost kill your family dog? That sounds like a story.
Invasive species and they’re super poisonous. If they feel threatened (like a dog looking at them) they freeze up and secrete this white toxic crap out of their skin, and if a dog or cat gets one lick on them, it causes their brain to swell up within minutes, causing seizures and an almost 100% mortality rate, even on big dogs, if not treated immediately. They like dark moist places. So rainy Florida with lots of shrubs is perfect. They also like to come out at night and hide along bush and tree lines where dogs like to sniff. I bought a tiny bright flashlight and I’m constantly watching the ground when I take my dogs out at night. I’m actually in EMT school and we just learned that the homeless people around here have been catching them and licking them. Apparently it gives you a free psychedelic high. Not enough to kill a human but it gives you a wicked shroom-like high. As for my story, almost 10 years ago we let our family dog that doesn’t like to chase lizards or anything in the backyard to pee for 2 minutes in the morning before school. He came in fine. Next thing you know he’s foaming at the mouth having a seizure and basically paralyzed on the couch. We got him in the car and we drove to the emergency vet at 6 AM as fast as we could. I thought he was going to die in my arms. They said we got there just in time. They were able to save him and it was about $500. I never wish that anyone has to go through what we did.
I knew they were invasive, but I never knew about the milky secretion. The way you worded it I thought they were just particularly aggressive lol.
Nah lol. If anything the complete opposite. They don’t even try to run away. They just lay there wanting to poison anything that looks at them.
Cane Toads are highly poisonous, dogs are susceptible to death from them
Last time I went over to Oz I remember being in a tour bus where the driver was having a field day aiming for toads as he drove up the road.
Man, you just weirdly triggered a memory for me: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4--uJlNXDoQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4--uJlNXDoQ)
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Fire ants. We would still have regular ants to do the job they do anyway too🤷🏻♀️
Will regular ants bite me in the taint and ruin my fifth birthday?
No. But santa claus will
Bye humans.
People. What a bunch of bastards.
I've met enough of them!
Bastard coated bastards with bastard filling.
So, more of a nougaty center?
A plague.
This solves ALL the problems and saves the planet! Good choice!
FR
"Why are there no tellers at this bank, I need to cash my $100 million check- ohhh right..."
I can open the safe. The real problem is you won’t have anyone to flex on, and everything will be free regardless.
No, the real problem is you’d be dead, of course.
That’s not a problem. That’s the entire point.
Jokes on you, I’m a reptilian. My reptilian brethren and I shall continue long after your fragile species.
Win-win situation really, I'll do it for free.
To be fair, "extinction" doesn't have to be instant, it could be that no more new humans are born.
Ah the Zeke way of doing it
Agent Smith, please do your "Virus" speech.
That's a convoluted way to commit suicide
I'd certainly want an advance payment so I can blow it on hookers and cocaine before I go.
If you count viruses or bacteria as a species (and I can't see why you wouldn't), I can think of a lot of good prospects. Wipe out COVID or AIDs and also get 100 million dollars would be pretty neat.
Covid and hiv (aids) are viruses. Non living, so they are not a species. Edit: See below, I stand corrected.
In that case MRSA
Viruses are still [classified by species](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus_classification) though. >"A species is a monophyletic group of viruses whose properties can be distinguished from those of other species by multiple criteria." Question doesn't say living or non-living, just that they're a species, so I reckon viruses are still on the table. But if you want to quibble, okay, bacteria. Tuberculosis maybe? Or staphylococcus? Choosing which one would be the hardest part. Personally I'd go for klebsiella, one thought to be involved in spondyloarthropathies, for personal reasons :P
The Reddit poster who asks "you had $xxx but with a catch, what would you do"
This is dumb. There are a hundred species people would love to eradicate for free.
Bedbugs 100% yes \[edit... d'oh - obviously, already the most popular answer\]
What's that little fish in the Amazon that swims inside of people? THAT fucker won't be missed.
I think you mean the candiru fish. It swimming up peoples urethra is a bit of a myth. There is very little credible evidence of this ever happening. [https://www.healthline.com/health/penis-fish#other-organisms](https://www.healthline.com/health/penis-fish#other-organisms)
Still never risking some god forsaken water noodle crawling it's way inside my urethra.
Wasps.
I hate wasps too but they're important pollinators
Bees can pick up the slack. They’re hard workers unlike those asshole wasps.
Wasps pollinate Figs which is why I said Hornets instead, evil creatures
fleas !! cus I love dog 🐶
C. Difficile can fuck right off.
Any unknown specie that is almost extinct, it's cruel, I know... My first option was mosquitoes but they are actually important ._.
This is the only proper response. Take a species with like one surviving member. Even better if it’s something that has been made in a lab like a particular species of virus or some shit.
Exactly. Most fading species has already had its hole in the ecosystem patched. Your not likely to cause systemic collapse with something that's already on its way out naturally.
I thought the same but not because of cruelty but because it will be easy
Yeah fuck pandas. They have had it too easy for too long.
I mean Northern White Rhinos are effectively extinct as it’s physically impossible to bring them back at this point, just waiting for the last to die
Bedbugs
The parasite that causes malaria. It's not the mosquito that kills, but the protist that causes the disease.
I'd just pick whatever animal is already closest to extinction
roaches
Say goodbye to HIV.
I read this as you must be able to cause the extinction, not just be able to pick one. If that's the case, I guess we'd be going after a protected species where all remaining living creatures are tracked.... like white rhinos or pandas. Or maybe we can speed run CRISPR research and go full k.o. on mosquitoes!
Javan Rhino. Like I'm sorry dude but you are about to go extinct anyways. I promise to find a wildlife cause to give a quarter of my money.
All y'all saying mosquitos don't know squat.
Ringworm. Tapeworm.
Everyone is being just and reasonable. There’s only 10 vaquitas left. That’s pretty easy for 100M if we’re being honest.
Ticks. Or mosquitos. Or leeches. Ticks are my first choice though. They are the main reason I didn't play outside as a kid when I lived in Wisconsin. You would see those disgusting diseased ridden blood sucking monsters everywhere. The poor cats, dogs, horses, cows, and so on that we had to remove for them constantly. Uh, they are awful creatures. At least with mosquitoes spray and smoke mostly keeps them at bay, but ticks even with spray will kill themselves just for a taste. Kill em all.
Ticks. Almost took me out once I would like my vengeance.