10 Deadly Animals Lurking In Your Backyard

10 Deadly Animals Lurking In Your Backyard
10.
Spiders
An average 6.6 people die from spider bites each year in the USA.
Two of the most infamous spiders are the brown recluse and the black widow.
They love to hide in your house, in corners and under toilet seats.
Spider bites are a painful way to go: venoms tend to cause sweating, muscle spasms, nausea,
vomiting, breathing difficulties and an irregular heartbeat.
In Australia, the redback spider’s bite can kill an adult in 30 days; children can
day in a day.
The funnel web spider wanders around and is particularly drawn to water - bites usually
occur around swimming pools.
The brown recluse’s venom has the additional effect of eating your flesh.
In 2015 a British man almost lost his leg when a brown recluse bite turned his skin
and muscle into a giant ulcer.
However, spider bites rarely kill people, because we’ve had antivenoms for years.
Death occurs in 5% of untreated cases.
For instance, even though the South American Wandering Spider can kill you in under an
hour, successful treatments mean its venom is being considered as a possible treatment
for erectile dysfunction.
9.
Seagulls
You may have noticed gulls are getting more and more vicious.
Gulls are very common in cities and seaside towns, and they find human food delicious.
Unfortunately, their size means they can and will do anything to steal your food - including
attack.
They’re most aggressive in the summer, when they protect their nests.
In Britain this century, at least two dogs have been pecked to death; several adult humans
have been hospitalised with severe head injuries from the gulls’ two-inch beaks; and one
man suffered a fatal heart attack when a pack of gulls attacked him.
In 2016, scientists discovered seagulls are carrying a new superbug across continents.
Bacteria with the mcr-1 gene can resist all known antibiotics.
So far it has spread to 30 countries, and there have been three cases in the US alone.
It’s been found in pneumonia and e.coli bacteria - which means the death rate from
these illnesses could rise from 1% to 50%, killing 1,000 Americans a year.
8.
Bears
Between them, brown bears, polar bears and black bears cover most of Europe, Russia,
Japan and North America.
The spectacled bear lives in South America, and the sloth bear lives in India and Burma.
In each region, bears kill an average of 3 people per year, but it varies - the more
densely populated a country is, the more deaths from bear attacks there are.
For instance, between 1989 and 1994, Indian sloth bears injured 686 people and killed
48.
Brown bear attacks are 3.5 times more likely to injure you than polar bears, and 21 times
more likely than black bears.
Most injuries take the form of bites and lacerations - a bear’s bite can tear the flesh off your
bones, and break them into the bargain.
In 2006, a man in China had a face transplant after being mauled by a bear.
Fortunately, bear attacks tend not to happen in urban areas, and only when the bear feels
threatened.
Attacks normally last under 3 minutes.
More reassuringly, bear spray has successfully repelled an attack in 92% of cases.
The chances of being injured in a bear attack are now 1 in 2.1 million.
If you want to avoid a bear attack, it’s best to stay in groups and be as noisy as
possible, to give nearby bears a chance to get away from you.
If you come across one, never look away from it and back away.
Don’t run, they’ll only chase you.
But above all, follow the official advice: don’t go where bears live.
7.
Ants
Around 5 million people are stung and bitten by Fire Ants every year.
A dozen Americans die each year from allergic reactions and infections from the bites; overall
about 30 people die worldwide from ant attacks.
In Australia during the 20th century, at least eight people were killed by the jack jumper
ant; it took less than 20 minutes for them to die from an allergic reaction.
In certain areas, 3% of the population is allergic to its venom.
While most ant-related deaths occur because of allergic reactions, in Africa there’s
a particularly nasty species: the driver ant.
As well as being an inch long, it lives in swarm colonies of at least 20 million individuals,
and unlike most ants, is carnivorous.
Their soldiers have mandibles so strong that once they bite you, even if you tear their
bodies off, the jaws will remain clamped onto your skin.
They’re nomadic, moving base every day in massive marching columns, going straight through
fields, streets and even houses.They kill and eat anything in their path, from cockroaches,
to snakes, to birds - even humans.
When this happens, they swarm inside orifices and into the lungs, suffocating the victim
before eating them from the inside out.
Luckily, this is rare: it tends to happen if you fall asleep outside, or are injured
and unable to move.
6.
Bees
Honey bees kill 100 people every year.
These are nearly all caused by allergic reactions to bee venom.
But if enough bees sting you, you can die from the venom alone.
Killer bees come from Brazil, where they were created in the 1960s by cross-breeding European
bees with African bees, hence the name.
The idea was that European bees would be able to live in hotter climates with help from
their African cousins’ genes, and African bees would become less aggressive, like their
European relatives.
Instead, the bees got a lot more aggressive.
Where 20 normal bees will attack someone who disturbs their nest, killer bees will attack
people in swarms of one thousand.
They’ll also chase victims for up to half a kilometre before letting them go.
Though they actually contain less venom than normal bees, the sheer amount of attackers
means they kill two people a year just from the stinging.
So far they’ve spread all over South America and as far north as California.
Hopefully they won’t spread much further.
5.
Tick
Ticks live in moist, shady grass - basically anywhere it’s leafy or green.
Ticks feed on human blood, filling themselves until they almost burst.
While the bite itself leaves you with a nasty sting and sometimes bruising, the CDC lists
15 diseases spread by tick bites.
These include: Lyme disease, which kills hundreds of people each year; Rocky Mountain spotted
fever, which affects 3,000 people a year and has a 20% death rate if untreated; and tularaemia,
which has ‘only’ a 2% fatality rate since antibiotics came along.
Other dangerous diseases ticks can give us include anaplasmosis, louping ill, and, latest
but not least, Powassan virus, which is incurable and has a 10% death rate.
Best of all, ticks are active all year-round, so you can’t escape them.
In an odd addition to their side-effects, more and more people are developing an allergy
to red meat because of tick bites.
4.
Rats
Rats spread several deadly diseases, including typhus, leptospirosis, and hantavirus pulmonary
syndrome.
You usually catch these by breathing in or ingesting rat urine, faeces or other secretions.
Rat lung-worm can give you fatal meningitis.
The filthy rodents also spread rat-bite fever, which isn’t fatal but can take a year to
go away.
They like to bite humans on the hands and face, between midnight and 8 a.m., when you’re
sleeping.
They tend to go for the hands and face, especially the eyes.
According to a study in 1945, rats like the taste of human blood so much that they will
eat more of it than they need to survive.
In Majorca, a homeless man died after he was partially eaten alive by rats, and in the
last six years they ate at least four babies as they slept in Britain and South Africa.
A dozen or so people are killed each year by rats having a night-time snack.
3.
Dogs
There are 4.5 million dog bites per year in the USA, of which 885,000 lead to hospitalisations.
On average, nearly 40 Americans have died from dog attacks each year since the turn
of the century.
Most fatal attacks involve strangers’ dogs; but 61% of all dog attacks happen at home.
The danger isn’t just that an angry dog might maul you to death.
Every year, 55,000 people die from rabies, and most of them contract it from dog bites.
Interestingly, when it comes to dangerous pets, cat bites are second only to dog bites
in number: but they’re only dangerous if the cat is rabid or you let the bite get infected.
2.
Snakes
In the movies, cobras and pythons get most of the attention, but vipers are by far the
deadliest.
You’ll come across them hiding in the long grass of fields, as well as the short grass
of your lawn, all over the world except Antarctica, Madagascar, Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii.
Every year, humans suffer 5.5 million snakebites worldwide.
From these, around 100,000 people die.
Even if you survive, the strongest venom often leads to permanent disabilities.
Survivors can suffer muscle swelling, chronic ulcers, sight loss and stroke.
In Africa, 6,000 people a year have amputations because of snakebites.
The USA has 20 venomous species of snake.
The most dangerous of these is the rattlesnake, which accounts for 95% of US snakebite fatalities.
In 2013, a man from Georgia was given eight vials of antivenom when a rattlesnake bit
him in his garage, but he still died.
1.
Mosquitoes
Mosquitoes are literally everywhere - in the hills, in the forests, and in your backyard.
They like to feed on human blood - and best of all, they trade our crimson life fluid
for a bunch of lovely diseases.
If you’re lucky, mosquito bites will leave you feeling a bit sore.
If you’re unlucky, you’ll join the 700 million people every year who get diseases
from the mini-vampires.
If you’re really unlucky, you’ll join the 3 million people who die from mosquito-transmitted
diseases.
The deadliest of these is malaria, but mosquitoes also spread encephalitis, yellow fever, the
zika virus, dengue fever and the West Nile virus.

10 Deadly Animals Lurking In Your Backyard

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