The Deadliest Creatures (Most Easy to Miss)

Real terror lurks in quiet darkness

The deadliest (and easy to miss) critters lurk in dark silence, ready to strike with either the barest of warnings or none at all - and with absolutely fatal venom.
Some you've heard about, and so sit there and scoff. Yeah, big deal: rattlesnake, cobra, black widow -- either you can hear them coming, avoid going to India, or simply not stick your hands into dark places. They are nothing but annoyances: fatal only to the truly stupid, or very sick... But there are others, nasty little things as vicious and deadly as they are quiet and unassuming.

The Cone Snail: can kill you in less than 4 minutes

Say, for instance, you are happily walking through the low surf merrily picking up and discarding shells, looking for just the right one to decorate your desk back at the office.

With no warning at all, however, you feel a sharp sting from one of those pretty shells -- a sting that quickly flares into a crawling agony. With that quick sting, the cone snail's barbed spear has insidiously injected you with one of the most potent neurotoxins in existence.
"The bright colors and patterns of cone snails are attractive to the eye, and therefore people sometimes pick up the live animals and hold them in their hand for a while." Meanwhile the snail may fire its harpoon, loaded with venom (the harpoon can penetrate gloves and even wetsuits).
"The bright colors and patterns of cone snails are attractive to the eye, and therefore people sometimes pick up the live animals and hold them in their hand for a while." Meanwhile the snail may fire its harpoon, loaded with venom (the harpoon can penetrate gloves and even wetsuits)

Nerves short-circuited by this infinitesimally small amount of juice, in seconds the agony of where the stinger struck has faded into a heavy numbness. A relief, perhaps, but then it spreads and moments later the paralysis has seized the entire limb. Then the breathing troubles start ... and then, simply, your heart stops beating.

Yes, there are antivenoms available, but, frankly, with something that can kill in less than four minutes you'd have to carry it in your back pocket to survive. It wasn't just for their fondness for these pretty shells that lead the CIA to develop a weapon using this venom to dispatch enemies.

We'll be back to the ocean in a few paragraphs, but for the next dangerous denizen we have to visit the steaming Amazon.

Poison Arrow Frog: Lethal Touch
That frog over there, for instance: that tiny, brilliantly colored tree frog. Doesn't he look like some kind of Faberge ornament, there against that vermilion leaf? Wouldn't such a natural jewel look just gorgeous in a terrarium back home?




Pick him and you'll be dead in a matter of minutes. One second frolicking in the undergrowth, the next spasming and foaming on the jungle floor. No stinger, no bite, no venom: just the shimmering slime covering his brilliant body.





The natives in these parts capture these poison arrow frogs (carefully) and coat their blowgun darts with that slime and knock full grown monkeys out of the trees with a single strike."They are the only animal in the world known to be able to kill a human by touch alone." They can jump as far as 2 meters - "that's nearly 50 times their body length. That is like a 6-foot (1.8-meter) human jumping 300 feet (90 meters)"





The lazy clown of the insect world.

Not a long distance from the deep green of the Amazon is southern Brazil. if you are a tired hiker after a good trek you'd want to rest a bit, to brace yourself against a tree for support. So what if you happen to touch a certain hairy caterpillar. It’s just a caterpillar, right? The lazy clown of the insect world. One problem, though: it happens to be a member of the lonomia family of moths.




The adult moth is just a moth, but the hairs of the caterpillar are juicy with nasty stuff, so nasty that dozens of people die every year from just touching them. By the way, it’s not a good way to go, either: their venom is a extremely powerful anticoagulant, death happening as the blood itself breaks down. Not fun. Very not fun.


Many powerful predators are loud, almost comical: they parade their danger; sharks announce their presence with a steady da-dum, da-dum, da-dum of background music; rattlesnakes... well, they rattle; lions, and tigers, and bears roar and bellow...

But the real monsters are more devious than that; they lurk on the other side of invisibility, never make a sound, and kill you faster than the sounding of that first note in a shark's theme song.




Beaked Sea Snake

Another creature of nightmares that doesn’t come with a theme song is a strange import to the aquatic world. When you think snake you usually think of dry land. But if you go paddling around the Persian Gulf (or coastal islands of India) keep a wary eye out for the gently undulating wave of Enhydrina Schistosa. It might not look dangerous, if anything it just looks odd to see a snake swimming in the sea, but don’t let your fascination for a "creature of the dry that lives in the wet" hypnotize you into getting too close.


The Hook-nose (or beaked) sea snake, to use its less scientific name, has one of the most potent venoms known. How potent? Well, visualize 1.5 milligrams. Not easy, is it? Such a small amount. But that’s all the venom enhydrina needs to, well, leave you "swimming with the fishes", as the mob likes to say. "The snake is also eaten as meat by Hong Kong and Singapore fishermen and locals alike"


Stone Fish waits for you to step on it

But it’s not time to leave the sea quite yet. There are two nasty things in the blue depths you should spend many a sleepless night frightened of. For the big one you’ll have to wait a bit, for the one right below it in terrifying lethality you just have to watch your step when you’re walking along the bottom of the ocean.


As you can see it's very hard to notice on the ocean floor. Like all monsters it hides, camouflaging itself among the rocks on the bottom. It’s what’s called an ambush predator: a critter that waits until something juicy walks, or swims, by. But what it could do to you requires no motion at all.

All the stone fish has to do is just sit there on the bottom and wait for you to innocently step on it.

That’s all it takes: the spines on the fish’s back are like a parade of loaded hypodermic needles, each one carrying enough bad stuff to kill even a buff diver in a matter of minutes. But death is not really the worst.

The pain from a stone fish’s sting is said to be so horrible that sufferers have begged to have the pricked limb amputate rather than live with it for another moment.
In a word: Ouch!.

Box Jellyfish should really be called the "coffin" jellyfish

Cone shells, snakes, and caterpillars can be avoided, brilliant frogs warn of their fatality, and I’ve already warned you about the stone fish, but this last terror does not roar or display its danger at all. Let's take one final swim, shall we, this time off the coast of Australia?

Paddling in the crystal sea, enjoying the cool waters, the warm sun, it's easy to miss this monster, especially as it's almost as clear as the ocean. Chironex fleckeri doesn't sound terrifying, does it? Chironex fleckeri is a tiny jellyfish, only about sixteen inches long. It has four eye-clusters with twenty-four eyes; its tentacles carry thousands of nematocysts, microscopic stingers activated not by ill-will but by a simple brush against shell, or skin. Do this and they fire, injecting anyone and anything with the most powerful neurotoxin known. - Broken tentacles remain active until broken down by time and even dried tentacles can be reactivated if wet;
- Box jellyfish are not actually jellyfish at all; they are the Cubozoans;
- Grows to about the size of a human head, and has tentacles up to three meters long;

As you can see on the top left of the image below, it's pretty hard to notice Chironex Fleckeri in the wild... The sting of a chironex fleckeri, also called the sea wasp, has been described by experts as horrifying torment:

Stories abound of swimmers leaping from the cool Australian seas, skin blistered and torn from thousands of these tiny stingers, the venom scalding their bodies and plunging them into agonizing shock.

Luckily it doesn't last long... In fact, the burning pain is over in just about the time it will take you to read this last paragraph (and you don't have to be a phenomenally slow reader), not even enough time to reach shore and call for help.

And as the venom works itself into your system, causing your nervous system to collapse, you'll realize that there really are dangerous things out there that'll kill you by pure reflex, by just crossing their paths - things that are perhaps the easiest to miss

Red Sheep of Scotland

"Do Androids Dream of Painted Sheep?"

Could it be a new art form? Painting live sheep and cattle in bright, brilliant colors might become the next big fad in Scotland. One farmer painted his flock of sheep (grazing on a pasture just off M-8 highway at Bathgate in West Lothian) bright red , aiming to entertain passing motorists and to "spice things up" a little. Well, everybody liked the view so much that it became an attraction in itself, and now they even consider using different colors, such as pink. The animals apparently do not mind being sprayed with animal-friendly dye, and will remain red until sheared.

This colorful tradition is ages old in Ireland and Scotland, where farmers were painting sheep red, or marking them with color - to make them easier to find.





Apparently they are also doing it in India









In July 2003, Britain's "most celebrated graffiti artist" Banksy covered a live cow with the images of Andy Warhol's face.
Not every similar artistic project ends happily. In East Farndon, Northamptonshire, a number of sheep were targeted by a local graffiti gang. The animals were found distressed but uninjured, but this spray-painting attack is being treated as criminal damage by police.


Another victim of graffiti artists (in Russia)






Soccer fans in England are already displaying their patriotic enthusiasm in a similar way

Animal Acrobatics

Climbing: involuntary

New definition of "lost":
This moose is not just "hanging around". It's actually quite a sad story. "This moose got his antlers stuck in a newly-laid power cable, strung on the ground for miles. When the men (from a big distance) pulled the lines with their heavy equipment, he went too. They could not get the line straight and went searching for the problem. The moose was still alive when they lowered him..."



Voluntary climbing

These Moroccan goats love to climb trees, attracted by the "argo" nuts.
Locals use these nuts to make oil. Goats seem to get a kick from both nuts AND climbing.







The only thing cows can do, though - is to get totally STUCK.








..and some photoshopped :-)

Sharks: Cruise Missiles of the Deep

Jaws... Cue the Music.

They are perfect, relentless and always hungry. They never sleep and prowl the seas like nuclear-powered torpedoes. That would be a pretty bad rap for anybody, even though few sharks would attack a human without being provoked. Scientists claim that sharks kill without ill will or premeditation and thus cannot be labeled 'malicious'. Yeah, right :)

Great White (and Smirking) Killing Machine

These guys hang around the shores of South Australia, South Africa and often approach divers with a friendly nuzzle and a line "Are you talking to me?"
These sharks have reputation as vicious predators, yet they are not unsystematic "eating machines". They attack from below in order to investigate what is floating on the surface.


Great white sharks not only swim, they FLY







This is definitely going to increase your confidence at sea: the enormous monster breaching the waves and flying at you with bloody dripping jaws. OK, it may not happen with such vivid color, but still....








The Tiger shark is the fourth largest predatory shark. This shark is a solitary hunter, usually hunting at night. Its name is derivative from the dark stripes down its body, which grow fainter as the shark matures. It is infamous for attacks on swimmers, divers and surfers in Hawaii and is often referred to as "the wastebasket of the sea".


Bull sharks often cruise through shallow waters and can suddenly burst into speed and can be highly aggressive. They are extremely territorial and will attack other animals and humans that enter their territory. Bull sharks are among the four species considered to be most dangerous to humans.
The first image shows the Shortfin Mako shark, one of the species that's officially responsible for eight unprovoked attacks on humans with two ending in fatality and twenty boat attacks.




In terms of size though, even the largest shark found on Earth today looks simply microscopic, compared to the size of prehistoric monsters, such as this Liopleurodon.
Note that close to Liopleurodon's mouth is not a shark, but a huge plesiosaur, in itself the size of medium boat.

A few amazing facts about sharks: - via

- A shark does not have one bone in its body. Its skeleton is made up of cartilage. Cartilage is a tough material, like the material that shapes your ear.
- The Swell Shark, found in New Zealand, barks like a dog.
- Weird things have been found inside a shark, such as a bottle of wine, a treasure chest, a suit of armor, a drum and a torpedo.
- A shark’s skin is covered with denticles, which are small, razor-sharp teeth.

Not all huge sharks live in the warm or tropical waters. There is a shark species (still in many ways a mystery to biologists) that lives deep in the Artic water - sometimes as deep as 600 meters:

Greenland Sharks Lurk Beneath the Arctic Ice

The sleeper shark.... the "gurry" shark: the largest of Greenland sharks are comparable in size with the great white shark, although there is no record of them ever attacking humans. Check out these teeth though: small but razor-sharp -


"Forget the cold. I kicked my fins and swam toward the shadowy figure. It turned and began moving toward me. I was face-to-face with a Greenland shark. I’d seen drawings and paintings of the fish, but this was utterly different. It was ghoulish. Its nostrils were the largest I had ever seen on a shark. They reminded me of a giant double-barreled shotgun. Its mouth was slightly open, revealing rows of small sharp teeth. Its eyes looked fogged over, like those of a dead fish, and from each one dangled a tasseled parasite." (Nick Caloyianis)

These guys are nearly blind, but they have a mouth big enough to eat a full-grown seal as some kind of muffin. There are also stories of these sharks attacking caribou as they drink from the mouths of rivers... and eating polar bears. So here you go.

OK, I am sure you are wondering by now, which shark has the biggest mouth and what exactly size of prey it can swallow. Check this out -

A Megamouth Shark!

This extremely rare (only a few have been seen so far) deep water shark has an enormous mouth with big flabby lips... Not just enormous, but freaking ILLUMINATED mouth (to attract some plankton to the light). Read more info here, it seems it's more of a relative to the ancient Coelacanth than normal sharks.
This is a species we did not know existed until 1976: only 41 such sharks have been found so far.

Awesome Octopi: Cephalopods from Outer Space

Nothing's like an octopus that wants to hide.

Pun intended: it does look like nothing until you approach really close, then it springs at you (morphs at you, intimidates and astounds you, you pick the right verb) Here is a video that most tellingly shows how some unassuming clump of weed on a rock can grow tentacles in a matter of moments.
This "invisible octopus" is fine, but "mimicking octopus" is even finer piece of trickery. We've already written about this lying critter, so here's a little refresher.
As shown in this impressive video, the IndonesianMimic Octopus (Thaumoctopus mimicus) can impersonate sea snakes, lionfish, flatfish - and in normal form it looks pretty weird, too.

Veined octopus - Octopus marginatus - puts on a neon show




Blue-ringed Octopus is well-known to be one of the "deadliest animal on Earth" (read about others who qualify) Here is a good info page about this species. "Although the painless bite can kill an adult, injuries have only occurred when an octopus has been picked out of its pool and provoked or stepped on. There is no known antidote. Symptoms include:

- Onset of nausea.
- Hazy Vision. ( Within seconds you are blind.)
- Loss of sense of touch, speech and the ability to swallow.
- Within 3 minutes, paralysis sets in and your body goes into respiratory arrest
See it live crawling around (and learn to distinguish it from harmless fish and surroundings) - click to watch >video. At the end of the video it looks just like a little brown fish innocently swimming by!

Some octopi (like legendary Houdini himself) can hide in a most improbable spaces, making themselves seemingly as small as they wish to be. Here is one hiding inside a shell! and another one trying to hide behind a leaf.




When they unfold and get out in the open, they are formidable animals indeed:
(a diver gets acquainted with one old and wise specimen in the Japan Sea, Primorie, Russia - a 23-foot Giant Pacific Octopus Doflein).



Choose Your Alien

Squids are just as outlandish as octopi. Here are some miniature transparent beauties: Teuthowenia pellucida, Deep Sea Glass Squid.
Still not satisfied that Earth can produce creatures crazy and alien-looking enough to come out of some nightmarish imagination?... like this one.

Well, this squid should settle the matter

The Colossal Squid is significantly scarier than a giant squid (we are past the "giant" scale now, into the "colossal") - it not only has suckers lined with small teeth on its arms and tentacles, but it also has hooks: sharp, three-pointed kind of hooks, wicked and wickedly efficient.

The colossal squid can get as big as 20 meters, which is more than two school buses put together. Their other name is the "Giant Cranch" (I'd say, it's pretty graphic...), they have the largest eyes in the animal kingdom and enjoy swimming in the ice-cold Antarctic deep waters.
This animal, armed as it is with the hooks and the beak that it has, not only is colossal in size but is going to be a phenomenal predator and something you are not going to want to meet in the water." (source and more info)

Mesonychoteuthis Hamiltoni are ridiculously quick, equipped with the lethal hooks, with their size most likely understated by reports (judging by the size of colossal squid parts found inside whales, much larger specimens could be existing in the icy murk).
Just to give you an idea, how deadly encounter with squid tentacles can be, here is an image of the razor-sharp squid hooks that can shred a victim in a blink.

A Paranormal Squid Romance, and a Warning
Vampyroteuthis infernalis looks and behaves like it jumped from the fervent concept art portfolio of some CGI studio - for starters, it is able to turn itself inside out (to the utmost confusion of its pursuer). It also perfectly mastered the stealth mode: red color in the pitch blackness of the depths is invisible.

Its body is covered with light-producing photophores, so it can also "light up" like a christmas tree. Its arms and tentacles are covered with.... you guessed it, teeth, razor-sharp spikes. And it's made out of "jelly" rather like a jellyfish, not a normal squid.
Now see if you can give it a license to dwell on Earth... wait, it already has all that, and loves to haunt our oceanic abyss, preferring depths up to 3000 feet. What lives deeper than that? More cephalopods!. Perhaps you've already seen the video of Magnapinna squid, the crooked, elbowed Hieronymus Bosch nightmare.

Komodo Dragons... They Eat Meat

Marauding Dragons on a Desolate Island

The world's largest lizard (up to 3 meters long) only needs one bite to infect its prey, and then it will stalk it - patiently, cold-bloodedly - until it keels over; and yes, if no living prey is available, it will gladly dig up human graves...

The Komodo dragon is the closest thing to a dinosaur that we have today on Earth, and to the "epic fantasy" wicked dragons. Its teeth are covered in bleeding tissue, its mouth copiously bleeds every time it feeds, drooling venomous saliva and flicking its long yellow forked tongue. Certainly, these ancient critters are dangerous, awesome and unique (get ready for the "Predator vs. Komodo Dragons" movie).


Derrick Pereira is a tech junkie, world traveler and photography enthusiast living in Dubai. He writes to us about his recent journey to the island of Rinca, Indonesia, in search of the mighty Komodo Dragon:





"Komodo dragons have become a noted topic in the press recently after an Indonesian fisherman was mauled and killed while trespassing on Komodo island. Now, what was this fisherman doing on the island in the first place you ask? Searching for lost treasure? Nope. Saving a damsel in distress? Nope… apparently, he went hunting for sugar apples. Yes. Hunting for sugar apples, on an island known for its population of 1,500 Komodo dragons. If you ask me, the media should be handing this guy a Darwin award.


The fact is, Komodo dragons are dangerous and should not be taken lightly. They are active, agile predators with razor sharp teeth and have the ability to climb trees, swim or outrun any human. They can also detect prey 10 kilometers away (are you kidding me?), they live 50 years... and they use pretty evil hunting tricks: "Komodo dragon has also been observed intentionally startling a pregnant deer in the hopes of a miscarriage whose remains they can eat, a technique that has also been observed in large African predators"


Komodo dragons can be found, natively, only on two islands in Indonesia - Komodo and Rinca. We decided to visit Rinca (home to approx. 1,500 dragons) which took us two and a half hours by boat (one way) from Seraya Island; plus we got to see a pod of dolphins on the way



All visitors to the national park must be accompanied by a ranger who also serves as your guide through the national park area. A fact, further drilled in by the park management, as they pointed to some dried up blood stains on the window left by a ranger who’d been attacked, a week earlier, by a dragon (he survived). Staying on the path becomes imperative.

Let sleeping dragons lie

Our first encounter with dragons was close to the Park HQ, just next to the kitchen area. Four Komodo dragons, attracted by the scent of food, sat around the area in the hopes of scoring a quick meal. The park officials never feed any of the dragons or they’ll get into the habit of coming back for more.

Fifteen minutes into the trek we see a fully grown adult Komodo dragon walking straight towards us… head swinging, tongue lashing and feet pacing one after the next, this Komodo was on the prowl! We moved off the path and into the grass to let him pass by





Komodo dragon can kill a man with a single bite
"Coming face to face with the Komodo Dragons in their natural habitat is somewhat humbling. These huge lizards, up to 3 metres in length, have no fear of humans but humans certainly have reason to fear the Dragons - two tourists have died while visiting these apex predators on the remote Indonesian island of Komodo.

The Dragons infamously have a bacteria-ridden mouth (their saliva is extremely toxic and mixed with blood) that causes death by infection from a single bite - the dragons bite their prey and then track the unfortunate victim for days if necessary while waiting for it to die. (Human bite victims, if treated early with a broad range of antibiotics, do have a good chance of surviving)

The size of their victims? Well, these water buffaloes are the dragon's favorite snack.
When they move, they move fast, as you can see from this very shaky video - it's shaky because I was backing away from their lethal bite.
Dangerous, dung-mouthed and drooling - what, then, is the enduring appeal of the Komodo Dragon on our collective imaginations?

The scorched mountains of Komodo certainly look like a real world Jurassic Park, abruptly rising from the sea beneath a relentless sun with little sign of human settlement.
here is only one town (known as a kampung) on the island of Komodo, but the whole island and the seas around it are part of the Komodo National Park, put in place in the 1980s to protect the Dragon and the other creatures of this remote island habitat. The Dragons themselves were only discovered in 1911, and the remoteness of their natural habitat adds to the feel of having stepped back to somewhere truly primeval.

It is not easy to get to this remote island

We arrived at Komodo early one morning after three days sail from Bali on a scuba diving liveaboard around Komodo. Even in the 21st century, it is not easy to get to this remote island, which accounts for why it's still not a major tourist destination (to reach Rinca Island you'll have to haggle for a boat charter from Labuanbajo). Infrastructure on the island for tourists is also very basic, and besides, you have to keep a lookout for the Dragons wherever you are on Komodo - there are around 6000 of them living on the island.
We took an hour long walk into the bush (in at least 35 degrees celsius heat and full humidity) with our two watchful guides, both armed with big forked sticks to keep any marauding dragons at bay. The island's landscape is desolately beautiful, the sun having reduced all the foliage to dry brown scrub. The arid climate is the result of hot dry winds blowing from the Australian continent. Apparently when the rainy season begins later in December the island transforms into lush green pasture within the space of two months.
We didn't spot a Komodo Dragon while on our walk, which was a obviously a shame. It would be necessary to spend several days on Komodo to properly explore the island. However, daytrippers like us don't go away empty-handed - there are several Dragons that actually live around the Conservation Headquarters - they're particularly fond of camping out in the shade of the kitchen hut. You can smell them before you see them - given their foul mouths, personal hygiene is also not high on the Komodo Dragon agenda.

Cannibal dragons eat their own young

The Dragons are not afraid to stand on one another to reach for the food (dangled from a pole above them) and demonstrate dominance - indeed, they are known cannibals, eating their own young on occasion... Occasionally they consume humans and human corpses, digging up bodies from shallow graves... They also make a distinct hissing sound when scenting food which is a warning to other Dragons to back off, although it has the same effect on humans too.
They are fascinating creatures and to see them in their natural habitat - albeit with some help from the kitchen slop bin - made it seem all the more possible that the Dragons are a throwback to prehistoric creatures. It also makes me wonder what else is living on Indonesia's other 17,000 islands, many of which have never been fully explored and charted."