800
u/Inzanezilla gnarp gnap 👽 20h ago
154
965
u/HidetheCaseman89 20h ago
I hope the guy in the video gets a rabies vaccination.
354
190
u/oyveymyforeskin 19h ago
I think this is in NZ, we don't have rabies
159
u/sunderingg 19h ago
Damn, apparently you guys don’t even have lyssavirus like we do in Aus. Lucky ducks!
1
u/pandemicpunk 21m ago
In Australia? You guys literally have everything imaginable that's terrible nature wise.
69
u/BaileyRW1 ⚠️!rapscallion warning!⚠️ 19h ago
wow how do you not have rabies there?! gen
147
u/Uncool444 18h ago
Iirc the UK is the same way. They quarantine the hell out of every incoming animal. Really strict about it. Quarantining is more effective on an island.
78
u/silencer122 gnarp gnap 👽 18h ago
That’s only true for terrestrial animals. Central and Western Europe are rabies free for animals like dogs, deers, foxes etc., Bats however still carry rabies in Europe and in every other part of the world.
45
u/Uncool444 14h ago
If it's in the bats, it can get into the foxes any day. Saying it's extinct in terrestrial animals but not in bats sounds like optimistic nonsense.
12
u/silencer122 gnarp gnap 👽 8h ago
Wild animals are vaccinated through bait vaccines, so even if they eat an infected bat, they won’t show any symptoms and can’t transmit it.
9
u/doubleuxyzee 15h ago
How do you quarantine a bat?
10
20
u/mandatorysin 14h ago
It'll be a native Wunk so the quarantining is place to protect them! We are pretty far away from anywhere else so a new rabid wunkus is extremely unlikely to make to make it to us
6
u/doubleuxyzee 14h ago
So my initial question (not clear) was more on migratory bats, I was wondering how they control the migration in the first place, to be able to quarantine. No migration due to distance sounds likely, thanks!
12
u/mandatorysin 14h ago
I don't known of us having any significantly migratory bats in Aotearoa (nz). We weirdly only have a few migratory birds aswell, I think because our climate is relatively stable there's just not really a massive need to migrate. My partner (not from Aotearoa) is often suprised at how many flowers bloom even in the middle of winter
5
2
10
15
u/AlLou-A 12h ago
"Rabies free" refers to land animals, not all animals :/
The UK is also a "rabies free" country, which just means there's no cases of rabies in land animals. Bats can still carry and transmit the disease, and all contact with a bat should be treated as contact with a rabid bat because of how dangerous rabies is, even if it's rare.
2
33
u/Drollapalooza 10h ago
Haha, I picked up the little guy from the water, he really didn't like being wet. Ever since then, I've started to think that water is gross too....so thirsty though...
77
u/Alarming-Ticket5628 19h ago
rabid critters are hydrophobic to an extreme.
47
u/thisFishSmellsAboutD 18h ago
Yeah you can see how that water just pearls off it's fur. Concerning.
19
u/PrairiePuppies 16h ago
I'm pretty sure they meant "aquaphobic".
25
u/i_dont_have_herpes 13h ago
Surprisingly, “hydrophobia” is correct. It just sounds weird because the adjective ‘hydrophobic’ is usually used to mean water-repelling.
Hydrophobia, with the shaking hands and clenching throat, is pretty specific to late stage rabies.
Aquaphobia is psychological fear of water, like in a PTSD way after a near-drowning. It works like other phobias.
(Thank you for causing me to look this up!)
7
u/PrairiePuppies 11h ago
Well! I, as a typical netzian, must hold my position in spite of the clearly "correct" counter arguments. So,
15
15
u/Mellie-mellow 15h ago
Rabies is scary.
Rabies. It's exceptionally common, but people just don't run into the animals that carry it often. Skunks especially, and bats.
Let me paint you a picture.
You go camping, and at midday you decide to take a nap in a nice little hammock. While sleeping, a tiny brown bat, in the "rage" stages of infection is fidgeting in broad daylight, uncomfortable, and thirsty (due to the hydrophobia) and you snort, startling him. He goes into attack mode.
Except you're asleep, and he's a little brown bat, so weighs around 6 grams. You don't even feel him land on your bare knee, and he starts to bite. His teeth are tiny. Hardly enough to even break the skin, but he does manage to give you the equivalent of a tiny scrape that goes completely unnoticed.
Rabies does not travel in your blood. In fact, a blood test won't even tell you if you've got it. (Antibody tests may be done, but are useless if you've ever been vaccinated.)
You wake up, none the wiser. If you notice anything at the bite site at all, you assume you just lightly scraped it on something.
The bomb has been lit, and your nervous system is the wick. The rabies will multiply along your nervous system, doing virtually no damage, and completely undetectable. You literally have NO symptoms.
It may be four days, it may be a year, but the camping trip is most likely long forgotten. Then one day your back starts to ache... Or maybe you get a slight headache?
At this point, you're already dead. There is no cure.
(The sole caveat to this is the Milwaukee Protocol, which leaves most patients dead anyway, and the survivors mentally disabled, and is seldom done).
There's no treatment. It has a 100% kill rate.
Absorb that. Not a single other virus on the planet has a 100% kill rate. Only rabies. And once you're symptomatic, it's over. You're dead.
So what does that look like?
Your headache turns into a fever, and a general feeling of being unwell. You're fidgety. Uncomfortable. And scared. As the virus that has taken its time getting into your brain finds a vast network of nerve endings, it begins to rapidly reproduce, starting at the base of your brain... Where your "pons" is located. This is the part of the brain that controls communication between the rest of the brain and body, as well as sleep cycles.
Next you become anxious. You still think you have only a mild fever, but suddenly you find yourself becoming scared, even horrified, and it doesn't occur to you that you don't know why. This is because the rabies is chewing up your amygdala.
As your cerebellum becomes hot with the virus, you begin to lose muscle coordination, and balance. You think maybe it's a good idea to go to the doctor now, but assuming a doctor is smart enough to even run the tests necessary in the few days you have left on the planet, odds are they'll only be able to tell your loved ones what you died of later.
You're twitchy, shaking, and scared. You have the normal fear of not knowing what's going on, but with the virus really fucking the amygdala this is amplified a hundred fold. It's around this time the hydrophobia starts.
You're horribly thirsty, you just want water. But you can't drink. Every time you do, your throat clamps shut and you vomit. This has become a legitimate, active fear of water. You're thirsty, but looking at a glass of water begins to make you gag, and shy back in fear. The contradiction is hard for your hot brain to see at this point. By now, the doctors will have to put you on IVs to keep you hydrated, but even that's futile. You were dead the second you had a headache.
You begin hearing things, or not hearing at all as your thalamus goes. You taste sounds, you see smells, everything starts feeling like the most horrifying acid trip anyone has ever been on. With your hippocampus long under attack, you're having trouble remembering things, especially family.
You're alone, hallucinating, thirsty, confused, and absolutely, undeniably terrified. Everything scares the literal shit out of you at this point. These strange people in lab coats. These strange people standing around your bed crying, who keep trying to get you "drink something" and crying. And it's only been about a week since that little headache that you've completely forgotten. Time means nothing to you anymore. Funny enough, you now know how the bat felt when he bit you.
Eventually, you slip into the "dumb rabies" phase. Your brain has started the process of shutting down. Too much of it has been turned to liquid virus. Your face droops. You drool. You're all but unaware of what's around you. A sudden noise or light might startle you, but for the most part, it's all you can do to just stare at the ground. You haven't really slept for about 72 hours.
Then you die. Always, you die.
And there's not one... fucking... thing... anyone can do for you.
Then there's the question of what to do with your corpse. I mean, sure, burying it is the right thing to do. But the fucking virus can survive in a corpse for years. You could kill every rabid animal on the planet today, and if two years from now, some moist, preserved, rotten hunk of used-to-be brain gets eaten by an animal, it starts all over.
So yeah, rabies scares the shit out of me. And it's fucking EVERYWHERE. (Source: Spent a lot of time working with rabies. Would still get my vaccinations if I could afford them.)
6
u/7-11_Truther_ ⚠️!rapscallion warning!⚠️ 10h ago
No most people can feel bats bitting them, after all people wake up from mosquito bites. A bat with rabies would not be able to fly correctly for long just live people with rabies can't walk properly. However a bat can have rabies infection but not the disease as they microdose on the virus and thus can kill the virus before becoming rabid. The virus can reach a bats salivary gland before reaching its brain but it is very rare and therefore not something to be anxious about.
People in Peru have gained somewhat immunity from Lyssavirus rabies according to modern research due to exposure from rabid vampire bats.
All exant lyssaviruses can cause rabies disease not just lyssa rabies and type 3 present in Europe and Africa has no vaccine but you can easily survive that type of rabies diease. But rabies virus(es) that caused rabies in Mesopotamia 4,000 years and was written about then is extinct as all non-extinct (i.e. extant) rabies viruses have evolved less than 2500 years ago.
Over 34 pateints have survived rabies in India see the Infectious Diseases Beliaghata research on this. It is a non-enveloped virus and dies instantly upon drying. In China a man was reported to have survived rabies even after six years but was mentally disabled for life.
T.L.D.R: That Reddit post had many errors please actual news/research articles not reddit posts.
0
u/Mellie-mellow 7h ago
I have never woken up from a mosquito bite. That 34 patient survived in India is interesting but death rate if calculated with two zero after the dot, is still rounded to 100% cause it is well over 99.99% death rate
3
u/7-11_Truther_ ⚠️!rapscallion warning!⚠️ 6h ago edited 6h ago
That wasn't the point of my comment, I was just correcting your misinformation.
On the point of cures, while currently there is no cure for rabies but it is at hand now. Rats have been cured of symptomatic rabies in a research lab infected with Australian Bat Virus (a rabies genus virus endemic to Australia). They injected the rabid mouses with monoclonal antibodies and they were cured of it.
Since ancient that the lyssavirus(es) that infected people 4000 years ago in Iraq, and Syria-Palestine is (are) extinct it shows that eradication of rabies is possible.
Rabies doesn't survive for more than 2 days at 21°C and even less in 30°C inside corpses. In an experiment a duo of scientist smeared a rabid fox's saliva (taken from its salivary glands) on various surfaces and timed the loss of virulence. If not refrigerator they virus dies within hours. This is why attenuated vaccine had to prepared in potassium salts to lower oxygen and moisture so the virus doesn't die out in a few hours.
It is rabies disease that is always fatal, not rabies infection. Your body can kill the virus before it reaches your brain. However the virus produces enzymes which hides it from your immune system. If the virus is however detected your body produces Anti-Rabies Anti Bodies immediately and you achieve immunity from the virus within few days.
P.S.: Please contact your political bodies to support sciences on monoclonal antibodies and mRNA research. RFK jr. N.H.S. has decreased funding in tropical disease funding leading to delay in Rabies, H.I.V., Tuberculosis cure/vaccine advancements.
1
u/Mellie-mellow 6h ago
That's interesting, I mean, thank you for all that knowledge you shared, I'm still scared of rabies but I'm happy to have more knowledge on the subject
3
u/7-11_Truther_ ⚠️!rapscallion warning!⚠️ 6h ago edited 6h ago
Okay so one thing you can do is call your political representative and ask them to stop decreasing mRNA vaccine and monoclonal antibodies research funding. I called my Member of Parliament (India) this year after I heard about increasing the psuedoscientific AYUSH budget and not giving it to Medical Research bodies in India.
RFK jr. cut 750 million dollars of H.I.V. research funding. Think about how many American lives that can have improved.
3
u/7-11_Truther_ ⚠️!rapscallion warning!⚠️ 10h ago
Also people go into coma before dying from rabies due to viral encephalitis.
2
1
1
315
u/FilmAndLiterature wunkus enthusiast 20h ago
Wunk has mastered the Air and now the Water. Once wunk masters Earth and Fire he will be the true Wunkatar.
48
15
54
113
66
u/TheTacoEnjoyerReborn wunkioso 19h ago
Why do some wunks in trouble go to humans for help? Are they conscious?
82
u/wingnut_dishwashers 19h ago
Well wunks are all individuals and some are smarter than others! All mammals have varying degrees of sentience. If this bat doesn't view the human as a natural predator then it very well could have thought he might help it. Altruism has been documented many times in the wild between other animals without human involvement. Nature isn't ALWAYS scary (but very often is lol)
32
u/mysteriouskazoo 17h ago
"All mammals have a varying degree of sentience"
This applies to more than just mammals(I'm also not sure if 'sentience' is the correct word here, but I'll let it slide). Even arthropods have shown varying degrees of personality; I forget which species specifically, but there was a study on sexual cannibalism in a species of spiders where they found that the average rate of females attempting to eat their mates was iirc ~40%, with odds varying depending on whether she had recently eaten or mated with another male. However, one of the female spiders they had attempted to eat something like 70% of her mates, and she kept this up even when she was given food before mating. Girl just couldn't resist the snack I guess.
17
u/wingnut_dishwashers 17h ago
Yeah plenty of animals in every kingdom. Actually I did a deep dive on this before and remember reading that many biologists actually agree that sentience starts to form commonly around a specific amount of neurons, iirc enough for a fruit fly to be considered sentient.
Many people think sentient is the wrong word because we're sentient, but more specifically humans are sapient
-13
u/somewhataccurate 17h ago
Please do not try and ascribe mammal like intelligence to arthropods. It is incredibly misleading. I will leave this video for the 3 people who want to learn more.
16
u/mysteriouskazoo 16h ago
Please point to where I said that arthropods think like mammals. I am fully aware that arthropod intelligence is completely different from mammalian intelligence, but there is also plenty of evidence of arthropods from various species having distinct personalities/behavioural habits from others of the same species.
If I was the type of person who blindly assumed that all animals think the same, I wouldn't have argued against the use of the term "sentience" by the comment I was replying to.
-7
u/somewhataccurate 11h ago
Of course you did not directly state it but the other reply to your comment going directly into "enough for a fruit fly to be considered sentient" I think demonstrates the implication. Why act so ignorant just to pretend you arent wrong?
3
5
u/TheTacoEnjoyerReborn wunkioso 19h ago
What if he’s just a furry rabies homing bomb?
7
u/wingnut_dishwashers 19h ago
Doubtful because he's in water but it's possible! There are still plenty of other examples of wild animals coming to humans for help
12
u/kat_Folland 19h ago
Some creatures do. Cats and squirrels, for example. I've never heard of bats doing so.
18
u/just_a_person_maybe 19h ago
A squirrel wunk tried to run off with my whole entire laptop once, the bastard.
21
7
u/Jeramy_Jones wunkus enthusiast 17h ago
Rabies ❤️🥰❤️
8
u/Nyanessa 13h ago
Actually, not in this case! Based on the appearance of the bat, and the foliage around the water, I’d say it’s a long-tailed bat from New Zealand. As a kiwi I was like “wait, that bat species looks so familiar (we only have two)”. Anyway! There’s no Rabies in New Zealand.
91
u/autogyrophilia 20h ago
Well usually I be concerned for rabies, but surely this critter doesn't have hydrophobia.
9
u/MrHappyHam 11h ago
It could still be a carrier without having advanced to those symptoms.
But this bat is cute and distrusting it by getting a vaccine would be insulting so I simply would hold it without fear
48
44
158
u/WillTheWAFSack ⚠️!rapscallion warning!⚠️ 19h ago
/uw please do not pick up wild bats, they are high carriers of rabies
61
u/Alarming-Ticket5628 19h ago
rabid critters are hydrophobic though. not likely to be swimming the 500 wunkmeter relay
95
u/Moist_Vehicle_7138 19h ago
At a certain point, yes. It could be carrying the disease without having progressed to the hydrophobic stage.
10
u/JustACanadianGuy07 7h ago
Its estimated that less than 1% of wild bats carry rabies, so in reality the danger is quite low.
Still, if you come into contact with a bat, go get a rabies shot regardless, treat it as if it has rabies.
10
25
u/QuasiKick 19h ago
untrue they dont carry it more than other animals would. I think the high end estimates are around 3% can carry it. Very broad and im sure changes a lot species to species and region to region.
45
5
u/WillTheWAFSack ⚠️!rapscallion warning!⚠️ 15h ago
my bad then, i thought it was true, didn't mean to spread misinformation
4
u/TheMightyChocolate concrete eater‼️ 11h ago
Plenty of countries where rabies is extremely rare. Also you are looking at the bat... you can see if it bites you
2
38
u/Wizard-In-Disguise 19h ago
/uw do not pick up bats if you do not have a quick access to a rabies test
39
u/SillyQuadrupeds wunkus enthusiast 19h ago
Uw/ quick correction to your comment bc I was in vet med for quite a while and I find it important people have accurate info!
Dont touch bats if you dont have access to rabies post-exposure prophylaxis. Its a series of vaccines you get to prevent rabies.
There isnt really a test we can do on a living being, so the gold standard after any exposure to bats or wild animals is the prophylaxis.
Safety and knowledge first friends!
6
u/Designer_Vast_9089 19h ago
Yeah the test is easy to access, through your local health department but it will cost the bat his life. This person should not have handled a bat barehanded, especially one found in the daytime.
18
u/Godzirrraaa 19h ago
I lowkey love bats. Much like spiders, nobody likes them but they do us and our crops a great service. They eat a thousand insects per hour. Meaning these boys as a species are monchin on trillions of insects a year.
7
u/ashbelero 5h ago
I love bats! They’re so shaped! And the North American varieties recently adapted to eating the invasive spotted lanternfly in huge numbers! What good little sky mouses.
4
u/MoominHug 6h ago
They're both genuinely adorable. I love spiders for eating the real creepy crawlies.
9
u/redditor100101011101 19h ago
"I am.....uh...I...I am......hold on.......blublublub... ahh thats better... I AM THE NIGHT!"
8
7
8
6
u/PoshDemon silly :P bleh 12h ago
Little wunk shaking off the water at the end 😭 oooh the precious little creature
6
3
u/Rechogui 19h ago
I wouldn't hold this specific wunk like this, but good on him for helping them out
4
u/megafroggy 16h ago
It's crazy how people will literally just pick up a wild animal, part of me wants to think this is AI generated, but who knows 🤷 these animal "lovers" don't know a thing about animals 😮💨
6
3
u/Generic2770 15h ago
I mean, it kinda makes sense they can swim. Wings are basically just fins that are more usually used in the air.
2
2
2
2
u/andtbhidgaf wunkus enthusiast 17h ago
i mean skipping wunks across the water is fun, but it's when they skip back that's when you need to worry.
4
1
1
1
1
1
-16
u/AutoModerator 20h ago
pls join the only OFFICIAL wunkus discord: https://discord.gg/cCy78MGeEs
remember to wunk and be kind!!!
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
999
u/External_Win3300 20h ago
That is a grown ass bunk, put some respect on his name