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. Wildly thriving in Queensland, Australia is a humble-looking tree the Gympie-Gympie (Dendrocnide macrolides). Don’t...

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 potent neurotoxin coa...

If you’re stung by the Gimpy, you can’t just conveniently pluck the needles out, as you’d do with your hair using tweezers. Its “silica mane” is too fine and dense to be seen by the naked eye, so good luck finding and plucking them off. The only possible solution left is to rip them all out using...

A dried-out, centuries-old Gimpy is equally harmful, as silica doesn’t wither off with the rest of the plant’s bio-molecules. The actual chemicals contained in its venom are not yet entirely understood by botanists, although the presence of a peptide, Moroidin (C47H66N14O10) may be involved.