Take even a cursory glance at the natural world and very soon you will find all sorts of creatures with ridiculously outsized capabilities to slay the planet’s one true custodian: us lot, humankind. Now, we’ve never advocated violence against animals in these pages before, but for this set of bastards, we’re making an exception.
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.
Animal Coyote (Canis latrans)
Body count Only two recorded ever, which is mad.
Level of lethality Listen, we like coyotes. They make us think of Joni Mitchell on stage at the Winterland Ballroom, doing cocaine back before people knew how to cut cocaine with other things. They make us think of Johnny Cash leading Homer Simpson through the desert plains, high off the Merciless Pepper of Quetzalacatenango. But they will not feel our cooing sympathies should we stumble across a pack of them on a hike across Rancho Cucamonga. They’re getting less and less scared of humans, and so attacks are increasing year-on-year – we may need to strike first, and strike hardest.
How we sort them out Dust off that old California hunting licence you have lying in the back of your drawer and let’s get to it; coyotes have no legal protection, so let the games commence. Pick your poison – a rifle, a crossbow, literally some poison – and show those dirty dogs who’s the real king of the castle.
Animal Marsh mosquito (Anopheles)
Body count Between 5.6 billion and 50+ billion people.
Level of lethality Well, we should address that body count stat right off the bat. Many will have heard the factoid that ‘half the people who have ever lived have been killed by mosquitos’, and if the all-time estimate of the human population is around 109 billion, then… Jesus. But we’ll say that 50 per cent is likely on the high side. Brian Faragher, Professor Emeritus of Medical Statistics at Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, urges that five per cent would be more realistic, giving us a relatively modest total of around 5.6 billion.
How we sort them out We’ve been bad at this. First we tried the insecticide DDT, which was devastating in its effects against our insectoid overlords, but also alarmingly good at maiming, so we abandoned it. More hopeless still have been the body’s own defences: one evolutionary response to the mosquito menace was the emergence of tiny, crescent-shaped mutations in some people’s blood cells. This prevented the mosquito’s malaria-bearing Plasmodium parasite from latching on, rendering 90 per cent of those harbouring said mutation immune to the virus. Unfortunately, we now have another name for this malaria-busting superpower, sickle cell anaemia, which, at the time of the mutation, reduced one’s life expectancy to the mid-twenties. Fly spray, long sleeves and big scary zapper lamps may be our safest option.
Animal Freshwater snails (Pomacea maculata)
Body count 200,000 per year, according to the WHO.
Level of lethality Wait, what? Did you know snails killed 200,000 people a year? Were you even particularly confident that there were such a thing as freshwater snails to begin with? Well, no matter. You know now, and it’s our duty to tell you that there are 4,000 species of these malevolent molluscs, and some deliver a particularly nasty parasite named Schistosoma, and thus a particularly unpleasant disease called schistosomiasis. Despite boasting the inescapably adorable nickname ‘snail fever’, this kills an estimated 200,000 people per year, ranking it second only to malaria for human kills.
How we sort them out Snail fever is mostly prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa and the tropics of South America/the Caribbean, so it’s advised to avoid bathing in freshwater in those places. If you do come across one on land, remove its breathing apparatus before making a quick getaway. Or a slow one, since it’s a snail.
