Animal Common kingslayer jellyfish (Malo kingi)
Body count One
Level of lethality Despite being about the size of a thumbnail, these gelatinous fuckers will wreck you up something unbelievable, should you happen to encounter one on their briny Australian shores. Their toxin is talked of as one of the strongest ever discovered, and even with quick treatment, a drop will shed through layers of your skin. Their name, while sounding unbelievably metal, is not, in fact, due to their felling of some distant warlock in the chronicles of Marco Polo, but a mean joke at the expense of their first and only known victim, Robert King, an American tourist who got stung while out for a swim in Queensland and was, as per the name, slayed.
How we sort them out Jellyfish are remarkably stubborn little creatures, and even if you smash them to bits, they are likely to reform into new beasts if they drift back into the water, so the only way to neutralise one is to take it from the water, hack it up on the beach, douse the pile in gasoline and torch it to kingdom come.
Animal Saw-scaled viper (Echis carinatus)
Body count Tens of thousands a year, presumably for centuries
Level of lethality One bite is typically enough to kill you, but the talk around these truly horrible pricks is that once they’re up and biting, they’ll get you as many times as they can. These guys are renowned as the nastiest of the ‘Big Four’ – the unusually benign designation given to the four most lethal snakes in India – and are famed for the uncanny ‘sizzling’ that their scales produce as they get ready to strike. Some poor forklift driver found one writhing in the back of a brickyard in Salford after it snuck into a crate from Pakistan, so stay watchful out there.
How we sort them out We don’t want to be the ones trying to coax one into a bag, but once they’re in there it’s easy street: baseball bat if you’re feeling pent up, incinerator if you’re ambitious, ball-peen hammer if especially vindictive. But don’t rely on plain old neglect – these bad boys can last two months without any food, and aren’t likely to be any friendlier when you come to get that bag back.
