Though memes can bring humor or even convey factual information — a recent string of viral ‘murder hornet’ memes provoked paranoid readers to kill every bee in sight!
That’s the shocking claim by Doug Yanega — a senior museum scientist at University of California — who says the ‘dangerous misinformation’ will harm the environment.
“You really can’t make this stuff up, but Americans across the country, out of fear of ‘murder hornets’, have started killing bees of all kind en masse,” Yenega told The LA Times.
Yanega, who works in the Department of Entomology at the university’s Riverside campus, says ‘millions of innocent native insects’ will be slaughtered as a result of these memes.
“Millions and millions of innocent native insects are going to die as a result of this,” Yanega told the paper.
“Folks in China, Korea and Japan have lived side by side with these hornets for hundreds of years, and it has not caused the collapse of human society there. My colleagues in Japan, China and Korea are just rolling their eyes in disbelief at what kind of snowflakes we are.”
The ‘murder hornet’ frenzy started when two of the rare hornets were spotted for the first time in Washington state, according to the Fox News.
Since that time the national panic has led to the needless slaughter of native wasps and bees and other beneficial insects whose populations are already threatened.
“I don’t want to downplay this — they are logistically dangerous insects. But, having people in Tennessee worry about this is just ridiculous,” Yanega added. “The only people who should be bothering experts with concerns about wasp IDs are living in the northwest quadrant of Washington (state). And really, right now, nobody else in the country should even be thinking about this stuff.”
While the ‘hornet wasps’ appear to be the stuff nightmares are made of, snakes pose a greater risk to humans than the new Asian wasp.
According to researchers, snakebites can kill more than 100,000 annually around the world.
Recently a new study found that giving snake bite victims oral medication in the form of “dimercaprol (also called British anti-Lewisite) and others derivatives found to temporarily inhibit snake venom and can increase survival success until reaching an emergency room setting.
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