Lately the question, “What is the most dangerous animal?” has come up a couple of times. Most people answer with lion, shark, or some other well-known carnivore. If the question is which African land animal is the most dangerous the answer is actually the Hippopotamus. Hippos generally hangout in areas frequented by humans such as in or near shallow water and if they attack the bite is almost always fatal.
The clever answer is the mosquito, which spreads the viruses and parasites that cause malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, elephantiasis and various forms of encephalitis resulting in millions of deaths. They also act as vectors for many non-human diseases.
This answer comes up in The Book of General Ignorance by British authors John Lloyd and John Mitchinson. They pose this question dramatically as “What’s the most dangerous animal that has ever lived?” Dangerous to whom or what? Presumably dangerous to humans and not cattle or ants. The authors estimate that as many as 45 billion people have died of mosquito born infections.
Are the mosquitoes dangerous or is it their behavior? To adopt a phrase-Mosquitoes do not kill people. Mosquitoes with parasites kill people. Really the parasites are coming from other humans or animal reservoirs.
It is unlikely that there have been many people directly killed by Mosquitoes. If there are enough of them they could conceivably consume enough blood to kill someone, but this seems like a rare occurrence. The average amount of blood consumed by a mosquito is 0.003 ml1, or approximately 300,000 bites per liter of blood. A large human has approximately 2 square meters of surface area, which is 20,000 square centimeters. Giving 15 bites per square centimeter per liter of blood. Before feeding they inject their saliva to stop blood from clotting and incidentally injecting any parasites them may be carrying. This is also unlikely to be healthy for the victim.
Outside online has an article “Itchy” by Jennifer Kahn, which provides another estimate.
To amuse himself, Vlach once calculated the number of bites a person would have to get before dying from blood loss. It is 424,242—a number close to what an unclothed, unprotected person might have experienced on a midsummer night….
To anyone who scoffs at Mosquitoes draining a human, I suggest a few days of naked camping in northern Canada. The feeding density can easily reach several per square inched. It is still unlikely to kill you but you might hope that it will.
1. University of Notre Dame, Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee Policy for the Use of Animals for Blood Feeding Mosquitoes
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