Snakes Dying From A Fungal Infection Is The Best Birthday Gift I Could Ask For
One of the first hints that yet another fungal disease that could devastate wildlife was emerging in the United States came in 2006 with a report that an isolated winter den of timber rattlesnakes in New Hampshire had suffered a population crash.
By 2009, Ophidiomyces ophidiodiicola, the fungus that causes the lesions, had been named. And it has been found to infect more than two dozen species of snakes in this country.
Sometimes the snakes recover quickly, but sometimes the fungus is fatal. “I’ve seen it go really, really rapidly,” said Frank Burbrink, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and an author of a new report on the disease published Wednesday in Science Advances.
“If it were a human, it would be one day Grandpa had a sore on his face and the next day it’s like ‘Night of the Living Dead.’”
Full story here.
I know what’s coming for me: a million arguments of how important snakes are. “Oh they kill rats” “Oh they eat spiders” “Oh they cure cancer and shit out oxygen” I DOOOOOON’T CARE. Enough of you fools! I hate snakes, and the news that they’re dying by the thousands due to some fungus is the best birthday present I could ever ask for.
I hope all the snakes die: all the snake grandparents, the snake aunt and uncles, the snake cousins, the snake parents, the snake babies, dead, all of them. I want it. I need it. I live for it. I’ll gladly accept whatever consequences there are for wiping out an entire population of predators. You can’t even make the classic shark argument for snakes, “oh they’re magnificent creatures that are more scared of you than you are of them”, yeah fuck that these are hell-beasts.
I’m sure something will go terribly wrong without them, or it’ll end up that they’re essential for our survival in some bizarre way, but I will still rejoice. I’ll gladly trade all of the snake lives for whatever shitty world we inherit post-snake. Book my fucking tickets to Bangkok baby. The snakes are dead. The snakes are dead. Thank God almighty, the snakes are dead.
P.S. Didn't know they had rattlesnakes in New Hampshire, time to move my family.
