Australia doesn’t actually have that many poisonous/venomous (poisonous actually isn’t the right term hear, a snake that bites you and injects you with something isn’t poisonous, it’s venomous, while something that you eat and then kills you is poisonous, basically venom bites you, you bite poison.) l animals in it. Just for brevity purposes I’m gonna just keep saying poisonous in the rest of this post, but I mean poisonous/venomous.
Brazil and Mexico both have more poisonous species than Australia does.
Really, all tropical areas have on average more of some form of poisonous animal, the most common being spiders or snakes/reptiles. The theory behind this is that since the tropics have more energy on average (more sunlight, which makes more plants, which makes more animals that eat plants) it is easier to sustain a high energy activity like making your own poison, compared to more northern/souther climates.
Really, Australia just gets a lot of media/meme attention, particularly cuz it has the platypus, the only poisonous/venomous mammal, but in total numbers it really isn’t that crazy.
It doesn’t. The media just likes to amplify anything venemous or poisonous in Australia. But we’re a developed, stable country so lots of people from other developed countries visit here and haven’t had much experience watching out for things like spiders/snakes so they think it’s a huge deal. South America and Southern Africa have more dangerous animals but often people are worrying more about the humans as that’s what the media tells them to watch out for.
I lived in Mexico and had people say Australia sounds ‘so scary because of all the dangerous animals’ and I’d be like ‘you are driven to school in an armoured van and have 24/7 security but you think Australia is scary??’. Anyway, point is that humans are far scarier than animals. Animals are, for the most part, predictable.
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