Australia is home to a wide variety of animals and diverse habitats-some beautiful, some cuddly and some super-deadly. In terms of a formidable reputation, plants are no exception. The Gympie-Gympie stinging tree is one of the world’s deadliest plants, and can leave you in agony and pain for months
Deadly
Being burned by hot scorching acid and a sensation of electric shocks trickling down your spine-that’s what it can feel like when you experience this stinger, and surprisingly, you don’t even need to touch it!
- An extremely fine corsage of poisonous silica needles filled with a potent neurotoxin coat the entire plant.
- It’s dangerously easy to get stung by a thousand of these stingers without ever touching them.
The Gimpy’s future
The plants have decreased the production of the toxin-all by themselves!
- Perhaps this is the next step in its evolutionary cycle or just a necessary adaptation to pose less harm to other beings?
- We don’t know, but perhaps, someday, the sting of a Gympie Gymmie tree will only be an agonizing legend.
About the Author
Dev is an undergraduate from St. Xavier’s College in India, and represented his state at the National Volleyball tournament in India.
Plucking them off
If you get stung by the Gimpy, you can’t just pluck the needles out like you would with tweezers – its “silica mane” is too fine and dense to be seen by the naked eye.
- The only possible solution is to rip them all out using hot wax, but even then, neither treatment is perfect.
The Gimpy tales
The plant isn’t deadly, but some people who get stung by it end up killing themselves
- In fact, the stings are so bad that people sometimes need to be fastened to chairs and beds to prevent from tearing their skin off in pain
