What animals have injured/stung/bitten you?

Cat scratches always hurt far worse than they look…

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The zoanthus flung its mucus? :flushed:

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Raggina Bird-of-Paradise. California Condor. Hooded Pitohui. Florida Scrub-jay. Northern Cardinal. Herring Gull. Mute Swan. Saw-whet Owl. My time as an ornithologist involved getting bitten by probably a couple of hundred different bird species, mostly while removing them from mist nets or taking blood samples. Human, dog, cat. Portuguese Man-o-war, several kinds of jellyfish. Fire Coral. Black Widow Spider. Tiger Leech. Many kinds of leeches. A couple dozen different species of ticks. Many kinds of ants, Bullgdog Ants being the worst. Many kinds of bees, wasps, and hornets. Many flies, mosquitoes, midges, etc. Tiger beetles, lady beetles, etc. Aphids. Chiggers. Lice. Mantids. Indigo snake, various garter snakes and similar. Several kinds of lizards. California Giant Salamander. Bluegill and other sunfishes.

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Botflies… I’m not a fan. I’ve had a few of those too when working in South America.

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Nothing really interesting or exciting… all the instances I can think of these things happening with wild animals was when I was a child. I’m much more careful when interacting with wild animals now as I was then. As a kid, I’d gotten stung by bees a couple times (twice I think?). I vividly remember one of the experiences because it was as I sat down to go down a slide we had in our backyard. A bee was on it (don’t know whether it was a honey or bumblebee) and I didn’t notice it, and when I got stung I started crying and went to my mom about how I had accidentally murdered a bee. I was so much more upset about having killed the tiny animal on accident than I was the pain I was experiencing. :joy:

Another moment I remember was when I was bitten by a spider, also as a kid, because I was “petting” her as I was holding her. So of course the pressure I was putting on top of her from my petting made her think she was getting squished so she bit me in defense. I accidentally dropped her as a result and spent like ten minutes trying to find her again haha. At the time I didn’t know what her species was called, but I now know she was definitely an Araneus diadematus!

The only recent bites or other injuries from animals in my adult life are from my own pets lol. Like my cat lovingly biting me (and sometimes angrily biting me… and scratching me).

Edit - Oh yeah there is a small instance. When I still had my job (currently seeking a new one) back in August, I saw a grasshopper on one of the shopping carts outside as I was working on bringing carts back into the store. Not wanting to risk the animal getting killed by any insect hating customers or coworkers, I let them crawl onto my hand and took them someplace safer, went to the side of the building to let them be in the bark in an island near a parking spot. As I was walking bringing them over there, they were walking around my hand, lightly nibbling me the entire time. It didn’t hurt at all, felt like both a tickle and a pinch at the same time, but I guess that counts.

Edit (2): Apparently I never uploaded my photos of that grasshopper here! I have now uploaded my observation of it!

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Just to understand, do you mean infestation with botfly maggots (Oestridae)?
Because the adults do only have reduced mouthparts and can neither sting not bite

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Trying to think of everything… I’ve had encounters with plenty of wasps & bees, a classic. I’ve been bitten by a couple spiders as well, and I’ve had cyanide on my skin and in a cut from a millipede (I didn’t know they could excrete cyanide at the time). While photographing a robin in Texas I accidentally stood in a fire ant nest and spent the next 40 minutes removing fire ants from my legs, socks, shoes, and pants as they continuously bit me. I’m sure there are other instances, but nothing else comes to mind at the moment. Thankfully, I’ve never been bitten/stung by anything seriously dangerous.

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Yes, maggots that burrow into your flesh and use their rear hooks to lodge themselves in so that you can’t pull them out. Unpleasant little buggers.

Not sure what species we had, but some species grab mosquitoes as they molt and lay their eggs on the mosquitoes. The eggs drop from the mosquitoes when they come in for feeding, and the eggs stick to your skin, hatch, and burrow in.

Fortunately, if you catch the burrowing larvae early it’s not too difficult to get rid of them. A patch of impermeable sticky tape suffocates them and, if you’re lucky, when you peel the tape off they come with it. If not a pair of tweezers used delicately extracts them once they’re dead, but you have to be careful not to tear them in half even then, and get an infection.

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Hahaha, the ants reminds me of when I was a little kid, maybe 3 years old.

I was running through the woods and jumped on top of a fallen log. It was rotten and I sunk in to around my ankles, right into what we used to call piss-ants, the big black and red ones you get in forests in the west coast of the US.

I ran through the forest yelling and pulling my clothes off while my mom chased after me.

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We’re lucky here in New Zealand we don’t have mosquitoes.

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Really?! Wow!

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allow me to clarify… we don’t have the species that vector nasty diseases of people… we actually do have some introduced and endemic species…
https://inaturalist.nz/observations/38821883

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some unusual occurrences:

  • a wild baby hedgehog (preferring my finger over an offered boiled egg)
  • a plant bug (!) that I have never seen before, never found afterwards and which was an iNat-first as well
  • this flea encounter
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Got stung by honey bees and wasps all the time as a kid and once even by a bumble bee.

I worked in an (wild and exotic) animal shelter for a while and had some chances to get injured by a variety of animals. However, compared to collegues I managed to avoid a lot of typical unjuries (snake bites, parrot beaks…). However, once a squirrel bit my thumb and refused to let go, which was nasty. I also got scratched by the claw of an iguana, which did not feel too bad then, but now, more than 15 years later, it is still a scar on my hand.

Later in life I spent one summer sampling the European adder on a small island in Germany and one manged to bite me through the glove. However, only one of the theeth punctured my skin on my thumb, most of the toxin was on my skin. I poured pure alcohol on it to neutralize the toxin somewhat. Still my whole hand swell up for some hours and for 2 or 3 week I had problem doing certain movements with my hand, like opening the cap of a bottle. No other problem luckily. Good thing, that I only got a fracture of the dose the snake was trying to give to me.

I also worked with social spiders (mainly Stegodyphus dumicola) for several years, handling them tens of thousands of times. So I was pretty surprised when one large female finally bit me in the softer skin between thumb and pointy finger - until then I was convinced they would never even try. They are the most peaceful spiders I ever experienced. It was a little pimple for 2 or 3 days and then it was gone.

In all those cases one could say, it was always my fault as I (had to) handled the animals without them beeing happy about it. The adder for example was just before giving birth. The squirrel was injured and did not like the intial examination. The iguana had to undergo a proceedure due to an abszess and did not like t as well and so on…

Oh and I got bit by my dog recently - accident during playtime in the fold between fingernail and skin with one theeth and it took quite a while to heal.

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are we counting pets and livestock or only wildlife?

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Both.

Leaving memorable ones. When I was a child I had a “great” hobby of catching voles, thing is, our house was new and replaced a forest patch, so rodents were hanging around, when tried to cross roads with curbs for some reason they couldn’t jump back and just ran forward and were easy to catch, so I did it from time to time, each one bit like 4-5 times, all hands in blood, but it wasn’t hurting and I released them in a safer place.
Pet lovebird, amazon, cats, rat, humster. My pet guinea pig left me with a scar on my finger for my whole life (that hand couldn’t move for 3 days at all, there was a piece of meat just hanging until we somehow fixed it, but muscle is not “whole” anymore, with a bump) but it was my own fault;
Arctic terns and blackbirds hit my head with their beaks when I got too close to colony/nest, though it’s not as bad as some say;
Already told about Ophion, but also louse flies, horseflies, mosquitoes (got >500 in a tent once), blackflies, tick and had to go to hospital cause others could’t pull out the head, bed bug nymph that somehow survived the extermination, jellyfish, but not a dangerous one. Forgot to add: praying mantis, so now I’m afraid to catch them (to relocate from lamp).

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A lot. Starting from domestic: cats, dogs, hens, geese, budgerigar, hamster. Wild ones: deer keds, water scorpions, Tabanidae flies (all kind and size), stable flies, wasps, bees, ants (several species), midges, ticks, mosquitoes,katydids and a toque macaque. Worst of them? Deer keds, stable flies, midges and mosquitoes because they are unavoidable nuisance. Largest tabanids because they are painful, ticks - because I am always uneasy whether I haven’t caught Lyme disease. Toque macaque because it was frightening experience - thankfully, it was not bite, only a serious scratch.

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Those were only the stings, I didn’t realize it said injured/stung/ or bitten.
Here are the rest:

Animals: Mosquitos (multiple species), Striped Horse Flies, Katydids, Beetles (and beetle larvae)

Plants: Burrs (found on sand dunes, about 13 spines went 1/4 inch into my thumb), Wineberry/Black Raspberry plants

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A wasp, a fire ant, bees, something that landed on my arm that I did not look at in time, mosquito, blackfiles. I most likely frogot a few. I will edit this post when I can think of the rest.

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