11 ms·
To put this in a perspective, 1 Mosquito 1,000,000 2 Human 475,000 3 Snake 50,000 4 Dog 25,000 5 Tset
by Koshkin 6y ago
To put this in a perspective,
1 Mosquito 1,000,000
2 Human 475,000
3 Snake 50,000
4 Dog 25,000
5 Tsetse Fly 10,000
6 Assassin Bug 10,000
7 Freshwater Snail 10,000
8 Ascaris Roundworm 2,500
9 Tapeworm 2,000
10 Crocodile 1,000
11 Hippopotamus 500
12 Elephant 100
13 Lion 100
14 Wolf 10
15 Shark 10
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-animals-that-kill-most-humans.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-animals-that-kill-mo...
- creaghpatr 6y agoI had never heard of Assassin bug but apparently they are all over North America. https://www.insectidentification.org/insect-description.asp?identification=Assassin-Bug https://www.insectidentification.org/insect-description.asp?... Wonder if those Murder Hornets will make next year's list?
- wetmore 6y agoWhen I was a kid at camp we used to catch them and make them fight other bugs. Those things are creepy.
- spijdar 6y agoMy understanding from (very briefly) reading about the insect family Reduviidae is some species are parasitic and spread deadly pathogens much the same way mosquitoes do. It's not the insects themselves killing people, but diseases like Chagas disease (Triatominae is a subfamily of Reduviidae "Assassin Bug"). [1] [1] https://www.paho.org/en/topics/chagas-disease https://www.paho.org/en/topics/chagas-disease
- the_af 6y agoThe assassin bug is called "vinchuca" in my country, Argentina, and it's a real problem here. There are ways to combat the bug, but once you catch the Chagas disease, there's no cure and you have to live with it. There is only symptomatic treatment as far as I know.
- gnulinux 6y ago> Wonder if those Murder Hornets will make next year's list? I was curious, so: > Since 2001, the yearly human death toll caused by stings of bees, wasps and hornets in Japan has been ranging between 12 and 26.[26] Since this number also includes deaths caused by wasps, bees, and other hornet species, the number of deaths caused by Asian giant hornets is likely to be significantly lower.[citation needed] from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_giant_hornet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_giant_hornet [26] is a Japanese source that I cannot read. Seems like they're not a huge threat?
- klmadfejno 6y agoI hadn't heard of them either. They don't seem nearly as terrifying to me as murder hornets. They're dangerous due to disease. Their nests are pretty cool though. Kinda like a flat hex grid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduviidae#/media/File:Assassin_Bug_Nest.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduviidae#/media/File:Assassi...
- fuckyah 6y agoLet’s get rid of mosquito and human. Problem solved ;D
- cameronfraser 6y agoPoor sharks, they get one of the worst raps for how little damage they do to humans. I'm surprised to see dogs so high up on that list.
- aclsid 6y agoWell, think about it. A mosquito bite seems harmless, while getting torn to pieces by a shark, in a medium where you cannot even run it is scary as hell.
- jl6 6y agoI suspect dogs aren’t particularly deadly, it’s just that there are so many of them and they collectively spend so much time near humans. Sharks on the other hand almost never interact with humans.
- csours 6y agoThe only reason housecats aren't at the top of the list is that they are so small.
- gpderetta 6y agoOr they cover their tracks very well!
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y agoWhenever I talk to people that think it would be cool to have a pet tiger, I tell that to imagine what a pet cat can do to a person. Now imagine if it was 500 pounds. And this is with an animal that has been domesticated for thousands of years.
- thrwaway69 6y agoI am not sure about that. In developing countries, rabies kill a lot of people. They might not directly kill people as much but their bites sure do. https://www.newindianexpress.com/lifestyle/health/2020/jan/11/rabies-still-very-common-in-india-says-survey-2088058.html https://www.newindianexpress.com/lifestyle/health/2020/jan/1...
- slg 6y agoThese numbers are weird. Why do we count mosquito-borne diseases under mosquitoes but don't put communicable diseases under the tally for humans? It is especially curious considering mosquitoes don't know any better while humans have both the knowledge and ability to dampen how disease spreads through our population.
- ravenstine 6y agoThat's kind of like saying that it's not the shark that kills people but the blood loss.
- slg 6y agoYou missed my point. I am asking for consistency in the metrics. We get malaria from a parasite that is spread by mosquitoes. We get tuberculosis from a bacteria that is spread by humans. TB kills more than three times as many people every year as malaria. Why is malaria counted as a death caused by mosquitoes but TB isn't a death caused by humans? Either you count both or you count neither.
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoI think it's because the only really meaningful experience you have with a mosquito is when it kills you via malaria.
- ravenstine 6y agoAh, I see. It is probably fair to count TB deaths in the "human kills" category, but I think we usually make a differentiation between human to human disease and disease caused by contact with an animal. It's just the way we see ourselves as separate from the rest of the animal kingdom. Although I get what you're saying, I don't think that human deaths caused by TB is necessarily what people are interested in when you aggregate all of the of humans at the hand of other humans, which may be why those deaths are omitted.
- godelski 6y agoMosquitoes don't kill except for diseases. Humans have means of killing besides spreading diseases.
- lostmsu 6y agoHuh, venomous spiders are not on the list?
- NikkiA 6y agoThey rarely kill, just 'really annoy' for a month or so.
- ravenstine 6y agoIs it most mosquitoes, or is it primarily aedis aegypti? I could swear I read that particular species was responsible for most mosquito-bourne disease, but I can't seem to find much information for the proportion between it and other species. If they disproportionally kill even more than other mosquitoes, that also puts things into greater perspective. Perhaps if we could target this particular species, it would save millions of human lives.
- DaniFong 6y agoi know someone who wants to do this, and probably can.
- divbzero 6y agoIs that “someone” funded by the Gates Foundation? [1] [2] [1]: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Mosquito-Week-2018 https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Mosquito-Week-2018 [2]: https://www.geekwire.com/2018/gates-foundation-teams-oxitec-new-breed-malaria-blocking-mosquito/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/gates-foundation-teams-oxitec-...
- dekhn 6y agoFrom Project Debug, Verily's attempt at reduction of mosquito problems: https://debug.com/ https://debug.com/ """Mosquitoes kill more people than every other animal combined. One species, Aedes aegypti, carries diseases such as dengue, Zika, yellow fever, and chikungunya which make hundreds of millions of people sick every year"""
- _iqha 6y agoHow about polar bears or orcas - and how would you know?
- ghshephard 6y agoAnd, in the United States - the most lethal animal of all is the ... Deer. (about 120 deaths/year, which shows how safe most Americans are from animals) https://www.askmen.com/news/entertainment/deers-kill-more-people-in-america-than-any-other-animal.html https://www.askmen.com/news/entertainment/deers-kill-more-pe...
- sarabande 6y agoOff topic, but how did you make that beautifully formatted table?
- Koshkin 6y agoInsert two spaces at the beginning of each line.
- sarabande 6y agoTesting (edit, it didn't work when I copied it from the page and added two spaces before each line, see below): 1 Mosquito 1,000,000 2 Human 475,000 3 Snake 50,000 4 Dog 25,000 5 Tsetse Fly 10,000
- xpe 6y agoSee: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html which has a link to: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc
- sarabande 6y agoI should be more clear. I know how to add verbatim formatting. I'd like to know if the OP manually aligned the columns in the table, if they used a program to do so, or something els.
- elwell 6y agoWhy isn't "Plasmodium parasites" on this list?
- holbue 6y agoWould love to see statistics from the other perspective: Which animals are killed most by humans? Besides insects, I would guess fish and chicken are quite high...
- agumonkey 6y agoyou mean farmed animals or wild ones ?
- derefr 6y agoIn that case, depending on the framing, you might care more about the balance of animals killed by humans vs. animals caused-to-exist by humans. (Or you might think both of those things are bad. Negative utilitarians don’t much like chicken farming, given the large number of chicken lives and the large amount of suffering in each life.)
- robbrown451 6y agoDoes this include dust mites in the vacuum cleaner or washing machine?
- morsch 6y ago0 Traffic 1,350,000 Sort of weird to limit the Human category to, apparently, conflict, war, murders, and acts of terrorism. Also, it's horrible that conflict, war, murders, and acts of terrorism are in the same ballpark as traffic deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... (2016)
- derefr 6y agoThe human category is limited, I believe, to intentional killing. Otherwise you open up a whole can of worms about macroeconomic trolley problems. (Am I killing people right now by making insufficiently-optimal donations to charity?)
- brenden2 6y agoPresumably if you're speeding or driving while intoxicated, you're doing so intentionally. It's not as if someone is forcing you to drive too fast or too drunk. These things (especially speeding) dramatically increase the likelihood of being in a collision.
- young_unixer 6y agoIt's difficult issue. While I think that we should totally put the blame on drunk drivers, I would still make a distinction between negligence and intentionality. Saying that drunk drivers intentionally kill people opens the door to saying that bad doctors kill people, bad medicine teachers kill people, people who vote for the wrong politicians kill people, politicians who enact bad laws kill people, etc. At that point the discussion devolves into "your party kills people because your ideology is wrong", "no, yours is"
- derefr 6y ago"Malfeasance" is the general term for doing something bad (usually professionally) for your own gain (or your own laziness), that can end up harming others, but where this is not the goal per se, just something that is an "acceptable loss" for your gain. An engineer who doesn't bother to verify the safety of a design before signing off on it, is committing malfeasance. We distinguish this from "malice", which is when you do something with the direct intent to cause harm. An engineer who verifies that a design causes harm, and signs off on it because they want to cause harm, is being malicious. Malfeasance is a crime, but it's one we actually can't catch very well, which is the reason we can't "do statistics" on it. Unlike with murder (where we almost always know that somebody caused someone's death, even if we don't know who; and therefore we can work out the statistics even without resolving the perpetrators); we have no idea (without thorough, expensive investigations that don't usually happen) how many of the e.g. buildings that fell over, fell over because of malfeasance, rather than because of a complex accident.
- jariel 6y agoThis is unfair because Mosquitos don't kill anyone. They are a vector for pathogens that kill. Humans are also vectors for pathogens, we just don't count them as such.
- robbrown451 6y agoPathogens aren't animals, so the mosquito is the one counted. They don't count humans the same as other animals, instead, they count homicide/war (intentional killing), and you can just consider it a point of reference. Are you going to count accidents? Suicide? Anything that can be traced to human decisions? Anything that can be traced to human biology? Any way you count humans, it just isn't going to be equivalent.
- jariel 6y agoIn the chart, the humans vs. mosquitos are not fairly comparable. First - if you're going to say 'mosquitos kill humans because they transmit disease' and then include humans for a completely different reason (i.e. homicide) makes for an odd comparison. For example, what if human transmission of the communicable disease results in some massive amount of death, which could very well be the case? Second - mosquitoes are carrying a lot of otherwise benign things, which most people recover fine from. Possibly things like the flu. Well some people die from the flu, but very rarely. So I'm not sure if the fact it was communicated by a mosquito or something else makes sense. Maybe inanimate objects, like the door handle to your public building, contribute more to basic pathogen spread, like the flu, in which case again, that would put things in context. It's a tricky thing to compare lions attacking people to mosquitos that happen to spread in some cases, some minor thing that in may have rare deadly consequences.
- robbrown451 6y agoWell I said elsewhere that they should probably skip the humans since it is so different, but I got pretty well downvoted. Malaria is almost exclusively spread by mosquitos, so there is a certain logic to saying "mosquitos kill a lot of people." But you are right that most times you are bitten by a mosquito, it is nothing but a minor annoyance. It's a bit different from a lion. Some people include deer in such charts, because people die by crashing their cars into deer. But that is pretty different too.
- globular-toast 6y agoThis list isn't really fair. Mosquitoes don't actually kill people, they are just vectors for a disease which does kill people. So then humans should get a point for every death due to flu, AIDS or COVID-19, right? And all the accidental deaths too, because I'm pretty sure the mosquitoes are just living and don't intend to kill anyone. So I think human should be number 1 by a very long way, followed by mosquito.
- hamandcheese 6y agoThey might not intend to kill, but they do so during the act of sucking blood without permission. That’s at least manslaughter.
- anotherevan 6y agoI am actually surprised cows (or cattle) are not on this list. Pretty sure they kill more people than sharks - even in Australia. (Mind you, the bovines also have more opportunity than sharks.)
- EE84M3i 6y agoI googled some but I can't find good information on freshwater snails? Some of the results reference cone snails, but those seem to be marine. How do snails kill people?
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoadding in covid-19 https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/2562261/ https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/2562261/
- erikpukinskis 6y agoIf you include viruses the top 10 looks a bit different: 1 Hepatitis 1,340,000 2 Mosquito 1,000,000 3 HIV 770,000 4 Influenza 489,000 5 Human 475,000 6 Rotavirus 440,000 7 Hantavirus 150,000 8 Measles 140,000 9 Rabies 69,000 10 Snake 50,000 ... although the Mosquito-related deaths due include a number of viruses, and all of these numbers are from different sources so should be taken with a grain of salt.
- YeGoblynQueenne 6y agoThe low number of deaths from shark attacks fails to account for the way in which people die from a shark attack: broken in two and eaten alive by a gigantic fish while simultaneously drowning. This is a horrible way to spend the last few seconds of your life on Earth and it likely triggers all the self-preservation instincts in a human mind, and then some. The slow, painful death from a debilitating disease like malaria does not even come close for sheer compulsive terror. After all, most people experience sickness at some point during their lives, but very few experience being eaten. This "raw, visceral horror of being eaten alive by a very big fish" [1] is the reason why people are afraid of shark attacks much more than mosquito bites or even accidents etc. ____________ [1] That's a quote from a National Geographic article I read a few years ago that stuck in my mind. I have no reference to it, apologies. It was in an issue of the print magazine.