Australia’s unexpectedly dangerous creatures

SYDNEY — I jokingly call Australia “the land where everything can kill you.” After all, the continent is home to crocodiles, deadly jellyfish, great white sharks, dangerous spiders like the Sydney funnel-web and 20 out of the world’s 25 most venomous snakes. But the truth is that my current home away from home has plenty of other wildlife that can also maim and even kill, sometimes in unexpected — or completely mundane — ways:

Cone shells

The pretty speckled or striped shells of these creatures lure the unwary to pick them up, but the venomous gastropods produce neurotoxic peptides that cause pain, swelling, numbness and even death in humans.

Wombats

The furry, barrel-shaped, nocturnal marsupials don’t look like they’d be much of a danger, but the Australian Museum notes that they can move fast (up to 40 kilometers per hour) and have been known to attack humans. A man in the state of Victoria, for instance, had his leg mauled by one in 2010. The other big danger is from wombats bolting onto roads at night where they can cause vehicle collisions.

Magpies

Most of the year, these pretty black-and-white birds are harmless. But nesting season brings out the worst in them. From about mid-August to October or November, males start swooping down on people’s heads in an effort to protect their nearby young. Some attacks draw blood, and there have been cases where people have lost eyes to the birds.

Honey bees

Most people don’t have to worry about honey bees — their apitoxin venom only causes a bit of pain and swelling. But about three percent of the population is allergic to the venom, and for them a sting causes anaphylactic shock. And because bees are more numerous than venomous spiders, bee stings actually cause more deaths in Australia than the spiders do.

Kangaroos and wallabies

Kangaroos have been known to get into fights with humans. But the real danger comes when the humans are inside a car. About half of the thousands of collisions between vehicles and Australian wildlife involve kangaroos and wallabies, according to a 2008 study in Accident Analysis and Prevention. This is not all that surprising to anyone who has driven down a road outside of the major cities here — dead roos are a common find. While the marsupials are definitely always the losers in these incidents, sometimes the humans don’t come out much better. The only good news here is that these animals are nocturnal, so they’re unlikely to be as much of a road hazard during the day.