I Touched the Worlds Most Painful Plant - Gympie Gympie (The Suicide Plant)

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more hair you'll be able to save so if you're ready to take action go to keeps.com backyard or click the link down below in the description to save 50 off your first order that's k-e-e-p-s dot com slash backyard today i found out there's a plant that holds the title the world's most painful plants and i guess i kind of already knew that this would happen but i didn't know exactly how bad this plant could be spoiler alert its nickname is this suicide plant gimpy gimpy as it's called is native to australia and just how bad is it well let's ask the locals like being burned by hot acid and electrocuted at the same time did meth got naked to skinny dip into lake fell into gimpy gimpy two to three weeks for them to return to normal pain continued for several months used a leaf as a toilet paper ended up shooting himself i'm going to touch this plant we're gonna go touch a bunch of different plants to compare them to this plant so first up is a native plant in florida it grows in a park nearby so i think this would be a good place to start our adventure we are in the jungle of florida looking for a painful plant how do you pronounce that [Music] cinderoscolostimularos all right so this is it we found it right here you can see that the plant is covered in a bunch of little hairs but these are actually needles and they're filled with a bunch of things like formic acid and histamine and when you get hit by the plant and the needles break inside of you it releases all that and it hurts and it itches so i've got the leaf right here and you can see all the little hairs on it you can see that they're kind of soft and move them around with my finger they won't stick into my finger but i i guess i'm gonna put it on my arm so i'm just gonna put it on like that slap it and see what happens all right who's next peter i'm gonna pass peter peter reluctantly agreed to test the plant and will bravely took it head-on i'm william osman and this is the world's most dangerous salad [Laughter] why are we doing this oh yeah did you think you got it yeah i got it definitely you can feel them like digging into you you can see it's getting a little red already already yeah yeah that's not great you're getting welts it doesn't hurt i mean oh it kind of hurts but it doesn't really hurt at all mine's got just red dots yeah i've got red dots too you have more wealth than me though that's just a bump okay so overall we would rate this plant a two out of ten peter says the mosquitoes are worse than the plant the finger rot gets a two now let's move on to the fishtail palm tell that i ain't touching that what is this all right so this is called the fishtail palm because this kind of looks like a fish tail i guess so i didn't know that this plant was poisonous until i was trimming it one time and the sap got on my skin and it started burning and i heard that the berries are actually a lot worse than that are they edible oh no but what do you mean by no i mean like oh no what did it taste like pain inside of this plant there's a bunch of needles in the sap like microscopic needles in the sap and when they get on your skin they go into your skin and they just start burning and if you break it open and you look at the like liquid inside of the berries you can actually see the little needles on the inside if you hold it up to the light it just kind of shimmers but we're going to take it inside and look at what it looks like under a microscope so you can really see the tiny little needles in here i prepared a slide for the microscope and it can already see the little needles with my bare eyes these needles are known as raphides and they're made from calcium oxalate which is the same compound that kidney stones are made from oh it looks like fiberglass those are needles there's still a little scientific debate whether the pain is caused purely from mechanical irritation of the crystals or if some of the plants lace them with a poison oh my god yeah oh my god they're like daggers this is what you see in a mesothelioma commercial now the real question is how much does it hurt and what does it feel like so we applied a small amount to our arms and we were kind of underwhelmed at first until kind of starting to feel it it just hurts like i feel like it's very uncomfortable it just keeps kind of getting worse doesn't it it's like not pain it's itch it's annoying it's really nice it really really really itches and i like don't know how to make it stop itching oh it's itchy dude i'm like scratching all around i really want to scratch it it doesn't hurt ah i want to itch it so bad i feel like the water made it worse almost well it's actually gotten worse it doesn't start no it doesn't hurt it just it just starts just really itching yeah it itches my itches right now i'm like trying to stay out of the circle i don't want to like make it worse oh this is kind of maddening so 1 out of 10 10 being most painful what would you say it's probably like a four or five okay yeah i would say it's a five because it kind of like sneaks up and you don't know like once again if you had your whole arm covered in this you would be very much panicking right now overall we would rate this plant a 4.5 out of 10 on the pain scale and next up is gimpy gimpy supposedly the world's most painful plant not only are we going to test how painful it is but we're going to test out some myths about the plant too this plant is known as the gimpy gimpy plant so we got this plant from a collector as a tiny little seedling after about six months it's about this size and i've been very careful to cut off all the extra flowers because i do not want more of these plants trust me the leaves on this plant are covered by thousands of silica hairs that break off an injective neurotoxin like a syringe and these peptides not only activate pain receptors but they prevent them from turning off too how bad is this going to be i would like rub your arm against it until you feel a spike oh did you feel it i felt the spike all right let me oh oh oh my god oh my god it immediately hurt this is it's like i got stung by a bee oh yeah i don't know i don't know how to describe it because i feel like if i got any more than this it would be really bad whoa it feels tight yeah this is dude this is this is awful oh my god it's like right really big look at this can you see this this one it's right over my blood vessel wow dude this is really bad it's like a hand sanitizer in an open wound it burns but not like fire burn dude i have oh these two are nothing compared to this how do we make it how do we make it stop the first myth i wanted to test was to see if there was a way to make it better according to sources online a dilute solution of hydrochloric acid would ease the pain and wax strips would help to remove the stinging hairs no i'm not feeling any relief i'm feeling like it's actually making things worse unfortunately the acid didn't work or we just didn't treat the area long enough and we didn't have wax to try but i don't think it would have worked anyway because the stings make your arms sweat so much that the tape wouldn't even stick so it's not getting any better but i've read multiple articles that say water and change in temperature makes it worse so let's try that instead all right here we go yeah oh yeah it makes it worse it definitely makes sense so i want control oh oh ow ow ow out it makes it work so it makes sense i don't like this at all so water definitely makes it worse but what about something cold oh that's like a 10. that's a 10 that's a 10. ah i'm pretty sure that that is like locally saturated for how much pain that's a good way to play i think it is the only reason i'm not panicking right now is because i know that it's it's not dangerous it's not like this is a burn it's not like this is like some deadly chemical it's just messing with your pain receptors yeah or else i would be kind of panicking because if you felt this much pain i would be very very concerned yes i don't know what i expected but yes water and changing temperature definitely made it worse another cool thing that i noticed is that if you use an infrared camera you can totally see which arm was stung by the plant because it looks a lot hotter and you can actually feel the heat on your arm too now is this plant really the most painful plant i would say it's definitely way worse than the other two but there's some pretty crazy plants out there i imagine falling into a cactus is pretty bad the man chenille tree is famous for inflicting burns and blisters and contact with the sap of a giant hogweed will make your skin super sensitive to sunlight and give you extreme burns overall though i would give gimpy gimpy an 8 out of 10 on the pain scale when you touch it the pain is pretty instant it's right away and it peaks at about like a level eight the best comparison i could come up with is each stinger feels like a fire ant sting by the end of the day i would say the pain is like a one or a two and the next morning the pain was pretty much non-existent unless if you touch the area got it wet or cold the pain would instantly shoot up to like a level nine which i would say is like a wasp sting or something but it didn't stay there for long it was kind of just like ouch and then it came right back down this stage of hypersensitivity tapered off a little slower after about a week water and cold didn't really bother me anymore but i could definitely still feel the needles in my arms for at least two months it was kind of like a little fiberglass it didn't really hurt but it was just kind of annoying and sensitive so overall what what did we learn from this video [Music] time [Music]

Channel: TheBackyardScientist

Views: 7,295,968

Keywords:

Id: 5BoVME0xrQY

Length: 10min 21sec (621 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/HingleMcringleberry1]

I walked into my this plant on a hike in QLD, Australia. Smaller plant got me in the shin and I brushed one out of the way with my forearm. Can confirm the instant pain, welts, everytime I hit those limbs again with other plants on the trail the pain flared up from a resting 7-8 to a 10 then back down again.

Hot shower exacerbated the pain up until about 5days after initial sting.

Not to be fucked with. If you used this to wipe (as a myth has indicated) I reckon you’d be in an inconsolable amount of pain, if you got hit in the face (also another myth) similarly, you’d probs want to make it stop any way you could.

Pics here of my experience, zoom in to the leaf close-up, you can see the toxin-laced needles

[u/fnoto]

I like how the way they "destroyed" it was way much more dangerous than the actual experiment...

[u/zeldasconch]

Feels like years of evolution is making me not want to watch this.

[u/nitefang]

These guys are pretty fucking brave. I mean I have as much knowledge about this plant as most people that have heard of it. Supposedly people that have come into contact with it have killed themselves to escape the pain. Granted I’m sure most people unfortunate enough to experience this pain don’t get a tiny spot on their arm but try to walk through it or grab it or something probably making it much worse.

Still I might be willing to get stung by some insane bug if the setting is right (drunken dare or for the right amount of money) but this plant would be a solid no from me. Risk seems pretty insane before you see how they handle it.

[u/Ultra_Maxwell]

William Osman!

[u/MrKnee93]

Here's the other guy's great channel (William Osman)

[u/pickled-egg]

The problem with this plant is that it makes you curious and want to compare it to something like a stinging nettle.

[u/JimmyMack_]

Of course it's from Australia.

[u/DaoNayt]

OF COURSE it's Australian