When you think of animals that might be among the most dangerous in the world to humans, you typically think of sharks, snakes and other notoriously troubling ones.
However, as a top-10 list of the most dangerous animals from Heather Ross of A-Z Animals shows, there are a few unexpected ones.
The list has many of the usual suspects, with sharks (No. 10), elephants (No. 9), hippos (No. 8), crocodiles (No. 6), dogs and wolves (No. 3) and snakes (No. 2) all landing in the top 10.
But you might be surprised to find out that mosquitoes (No. 1) topped the list, and freshwater snails (No. 4), kissing bugs (No. 5) and tsetse flies (No. 7) also made the cut.
The rankings are based on "the number of deaths they are responsible for with some adjustments made for aggression, percentage of fatal attacks, and other similar factors."
Reinhard Dirscherl/ullstein bild/Getty Images
We know mosquitoes are dangerous because of their ability to transmit diseases, but the number of humans they kill on average in a year is astounding: between 750,000 to one million.
Like mosquitoes, the bites of the kissing bugs and tsetse flies won't kill you, but the resulting infection or disease from them will.
Tsetse flies transmit Human African trypanosomiasis (HAT), which kills tens of thousands of humans each year. Meanwhile, kissing bugs transmit Chagas disease that kills between 12,000 to 15,000 humans.
With freshwater snails, they release a parasite into the water that causes an infection called schistosomiasis that leads to roughly 200,000 deaths annually.
from Men's Journal https://ift.tt/nuldRUY
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