Originally published at: Australians warned not to touch or even approach the poisonous Dendrocnide trees there | Boing Boing
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Sometimes I wonder if Australia’s natural world is one wrathful, Gaia-like entity doing everything it can to expell humans from its lands.
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Backyard Scientist and several youtubers touched this plant and several other plants with irritants for, um, science:
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I don’t know… people have lived there for thousands of years, so… 
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WTAF, Australia? How the hell does a plant even evolve something like this? It is not a predator. Maybe a leftover from fending off dinosaurs? Seems like overkill for kangaroos!
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more than 65 of those thousands even!
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The world’s most dangerous tree is native to Florida, for what it’s worth:
Standing beneath the tree during rain will cause blistering of the skin from mere contact with this liquid: even a small drop of rain with the milky substance in it will cause the skin to blister. The sap has also been known to damage the paint on cars.
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That tracks.
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How does it stack against the mighty maiming manchineel?
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Killer plants in the UK also:
But honestly, Australia, can you pass a single day without finding another lethal threat?
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Why isn’t the example tree 60 feet tall and quite big around? The predatory bush developer organisms? [Fails as a city planner within heart.]
Hogweed enters the chat.
Oh, the forbidden spice golpar! I’ll take cancer codrug workup candidates for $700 Alex. …no, boil it with nettle or something for a month first, darnit of course it’s photosensitized death on stilts.
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Haha; I always wondered which trees were poisonous on this trail. More info would have been useful, but I touched nothing (so tempting, though!). This was Jost Van Dyke in the Caribbean.
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The threat of these plants is almost comical in how extreme it is - it’s hard to believe descriptions of them are real. It’s not just that it’s unbelievably painful and that there’s no effective treatment beyond lots of pain medication, apparently the venom-pumping spines stick in your skin and just stay there, potentially for a year, re-injecting you with poison every time they’re triggered by (e.g. temperature change, water, touch…), even the brown dead leaves are dangerous, so you don’t even have to touch the plant itself.
There are possibly apocryphal stories of people using the leaves for toilet paper and then killing themselves to escape the pain - which is plausible, except I suspect just picking the leaves would instantly suggest touching any other part of your body with them would be a terrible mistake.
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So, “wrathful” but not particularly good at it, then?
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I really don’t know what it is about Australia’s animals and plants just being the absolute worst. But this plant sounds absolutely awful 
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I’m just saying that if Australia is trying to rid itself of people, it’s doing a piss-poor job, as people have been there are 65000 years, as @gatto noted…
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Fixed 
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Instant fertilizer with the corpses of unlucky creatures comes to mind.
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“The sting shows that it’s working.”
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