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Comment by sunstone | Hacker News Reader

Don't mention the snakes :O ... and spiders, box jellies and killer koalas. Ah white sharks and salt water crocs. Have I missed anything?

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I'll probably get a visit from the Australian Secret Tourist Police for saying this to foreigners, but the danger is way overstated.

The last person that died from a spider bite was in 1979. Snakes and spiders mostly just want to left alone. Crocodiles and marine stingers only exist in the tropics, and Sharks only eat ocean swimmers.

I grew up very close to native bush land on the outskirts of Sydney and have never been 'prey' to another creature while playing in the bush.

Of course, I wouldn't have done that if drop-bears [1] were around though.

[1] http://australianmuseum.net.au/drop-bear

I grew up on the north coast of NSW in the bush and the big thing that used to scare me were death adders [1]. The bastards lie in wait in the leaf litter waiting for a bird to come down and grab their tail which they wave around like a worm. Unlike all the other snakes they don't run away when they hear you coming so they are easy to step on - the fact they are one of the most venomous snakes in the world is just the cherry on top.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acanthophis

> The last person that died from a spider bite was in 1979.

There was one this year, actually[1]. Non-fatal bites are more common, but there's no official statistics because it's not a reportable medical emergency.

Folks that live near bushland of any variety know to do the basics like not sticking your fingers into areas you can't see, and not weeding/digging in the garden within the Sydney region with bare hands.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/12/young-man-dies-af...

> [I] have never been 'prey' to another creature while playing in the bus

Survivor bias, mate.

Fun fact: the most common spider-related cause of death in Australia is not people being bitten, but a spider hiding in a car's sun visor, people opening said visor while driving and then crashing the car when the spider falls into their lap.

(BTH, this requires only one such fatal crash because nobody in Australia has died from a spider bite since 1979).

Drop bears?

More seriously, didn't Australia previously have some geological activity? I've heard of lava tubes near Cairns and have visited the Sunshine Coast where I believe there are (dormant?) volcanos?

Those volcanoes are a feature of the area, but they seem to be very much extinct, not dormant.

The deadliest animals in Australia, by far, are horses and cattle.

That's the secret Australians don't want you to know!

You don't have any deer like we in the US do, right? That's our deadest animal, through crashing with cars.

They have (imported) deer in NZ, but I'm not sure how widespread. The analogue of deer here in Aus are kangaroos, but they're not so deadly in a crash. Livestock are indeed our deadliest animals.

Most of our native wildlife is pretty sleepy and shy - there's only a couple of snakes that are aggressive; most run (slither?) away from humans. Apart from that, crocodiles are really only the remaining aggressive land animal, but there's not a lot of overlap between a population map of humans vs crocodiles here.

There's feral deer in the Australian Alps. I came across one in the middle of the road driving back from Thredbo very late one night.

Cassowaries can be pretty aggressive. Dingos are dangerous for children. Magpies are very aggressive but can only maim, not kill.

I thought about including cassowaries, but you generally have to provoke them - they don't usually hunt you down to attack you. Magpies swoop, sure, but that's not the kind of dangerous that people talk about.

Dingoes, fair enough, I missed those. They're opportunistic though, and you have to go looking for reports on attacks (apart from the obvious one, which was hard to escape the media frenzy of...). Dingo attacks a but a drop in the ocean compared to other (pet) dog attacks here.

Moose are significantly worse in car accidents than deer. But there are fewer of them and they're not in nearly as many regions so the overall numbers are far lower. But there are some places (Alaska, Maine, also Newfoundland in Canada) where they're a serious hazard.

There are deer in Australia, but if they're anything like the deer in New Zealand, they tend to stay well away from humans, since deer hunting is a lot less restricted (since they are introduced).

In my experience they're pretty shy, but there are so many of them, enough of them cross roads, and we have 13.5 times your population, with plenty of it in e.g. the fairly crowded North East where the old farms have returned to forest due to it being so much more efficient to farm out here in the mid-West, there are enough deer-car interactions to, well, wow, I just found this 2001 article, and per Wikipedia below, things have not gotten significantly better: http://reason.com/archives/2001/11/21/north-americas-most-da...

The most dangerous mammal in North America is...Bambi. The U.S. Department of Transportation estimates that white-tailed deer kill around 130 Americans each year simply by causing car accidents. In 1994, these predator deer had a banner year, causing 211 human deaths in car wrecks.

There are about 1.5 million deer/vehicle collisions annually, resulting in 29,000 human injuries and more than $1 billion in insurance claims in addition to the death toll.

And here's Wikipedia on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer%E2%80%93vehicle_collision... They even kill around 20/year in Germany.

Kangaroos fill that niche here.

Wombats mess up cars pretty bad if you hit one.

But at least the land itself doesn't want to kill us.

Well, except when a beach tries to swallow you: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3250475/A-car-carava...

...or when your backyard tries to swallow you: https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2016/aug/02/news-foo...

That is an anecdote obviously, not a widespread danger.

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