I’ve never seen ones as small as 2mm but I’ve had larger (6 mm) leave my legs bleeding a few times in SLO county, California. Wasn’t as worried about them as I was about the blood attracting sharks though.
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Here we see the Australian Legless Nope in its natural habitat eating a Flying Nope. Majestic.
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Oh HELLZ NOPE!
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OH shit! Batman!!! Nooooo!!!
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Now with even more nope! Video of different snake and bat, same idea. https://www.youtube.com/embed/y7v_ToojHhs
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Guys. Calm down.
A) This is my local beach.
B) These ‘water fleas’ didn’t eat his legs off.
C) He was standing in the water ‘icing’ his legs after a footy game, knee-deep at most.
D) His legs were bleeding from the shin down.
E) There did seem to be a fair bit of blood, but that’s because these things probably inject anti-coagulant when they bite, according to the marine biologist.
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I’ve been attacked by these things, I think, in the Wetar Strait. These or something like them.
I had hoped off a boat and was swimming towards the shore, enjoying some peace and quiet and the lovely warm water. After about a hundred metres I swam through a drift of seaweed, still smiling my smile of smug happiness. Then I felt a small needle like stab. Odd. I sort of looked around, and assumed it was just a hard stem of seaweed that had brushed against me. But then there was another, and another, and another. And I was out of the seaweed drift by now, so it wasn’t that. With my calm equipoise rapidly evaporating I started to frantically look around for what was stabbing me, but couldn’t see a damn thing.* Swimming rapidly now, I struck out for the shore. As I recall, the attacks seemed to diminish as I got away from the seaweed and/or I sped up.
There were no marks on me afterwards, or blood, and talking to one of the other folks there they mumbled something about sea lice. I didn’t swim back to the boat.
That same trip I also saw flying fish, which was super wonderful and more-or-less made up for the mysterious stabby needle things.
* I assume they were too small to see, and anyway I didn’t have goggles on so couldn’t look around underwater.
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Play me off Kate!
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Nothing you just wrote restores my calm.
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Oh SHIT! DROPBEARS!!! FUCKING RUNNNNN!!!
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this happened in melbounre…don’t confuse melbourne with australia. sure, cartographers will tell you that melbourne is technically part of australia, but…they wear long pants down there, so culturally it’s not considered part of the country.
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Wasn’t trying to restore your calm, just for everyone to settle the fuck down.
On a scale of one to living with deadly spiders, snakes and crocs, I’ll take these any day!
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Chiggers? Never seen one, thank God.
Chiggers is what they call some small bug that bites in the grass around here.
These are called jiggers, and they do kinda look like fleas, and they burrow under the skin of your feet and you cut them out and end up with a bunch of holes in your feet - like a lotus seed pod. Happy googleing!
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Can’t be worse than Florida though
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It seems to me that long pants would have been a better option in this particular incident, though.
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that’s the problem…all that long pant wearing has made the legs of melburnians soft and flabby and open to attack from the smallest marine creature that exists.
So many deadly things in Australia. But no guns, so fewer deadly people!
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At least they don’t fly.
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