Having grown up outside of Melbourne, I have to second Una’s “meh.” Small boys do not collect the usual snips and snails and puppy dog tails as they are likely venomous and pushing sticks into holes just was not done, but no, Australian fauna wasn’t much of a concern to a small kid.
Our most deadly animal is a European import. And that’s excluding humans from the statistics. Answer at the end.
As an Australian author, I have written books on both spiders and crocodiles. The thousands of Japanese soldiers killed by crocs on Ramree Island is not verified, and considered a pretty suspect story by many. Google will lead you to more on that. Granted, though, saltwater crocodiles do eat the odd human. May I dispute the implication in the column that it is only Australians that they eat? They are not racist. They also enjoy drunk tourists who stupidly swim in crocodile infested waters at night. On average, there’s less than one death a year from croc attacks.
Spiders are my true passion. As stated in the Cecil’s column, ours don’t manage to kill anyone, have rarely done so (30 or so recorded deaths ever!). There are redbacks everywhere here where i live, but you never hear of anyone being bitten. Spiders are such extraordinary creatures, but most people never get to know it because they smudge first and ask questions later. Or just smudge and never ask questions.
I run a blogspot for my local Australian spiders, The Spiderblogger, given they can’t blog for themselves. They are not in the slightest bit frightening. Australia is safe. It’s heaven living here with our wildlife!
And the most deadly ‘Australian’ animal? The European honey bee. Allergic reactions kill three times as many people as crocodiles do - and infinitely more than spiders, given spiders don’t kill anyone any more. You guys in Europe and the US live every day with our most deadly animal!
Helpful link to Cecil’s column so that the rest of us can follow along:
One of the great conspiracies of all time has been perpetrated by the
all-powerful Australian Tourist Bureau (call it the ATB). The ATB is a
historical world master of misinformation, disinformation and The Lie,
having suppressed the fact that lethal wild animal encounter is the
third leading cause of death in Australia, right up there with and not
far behind cancer and cardiovascular diseases, and ahead of stroke.
The ATB even fooled Cecil!!! (well, they fooled that Bryson guy who
Cecil relied upon as a source). To say Australia has “at least 14 different
types of poisonous snake” when it really has at least 33 is enough of
an understatement to constitute serious error:
…especially when so many species are among the deadliest known, with
the Inland Taipan, Eastern Brown and Coastal Taipan ranked 1-2-3 by some authorities.
Another of these beasts, the Central Ranges Taipan, was discovered only in 2007,
so no telling what more await the unsuspecting (or what others the ATB has managed
to suppress report of).
No wonder Una would have no part of an Outback airdrop! (But isn’t that
a bit strange if she really thinks there is nothing to be afraid of? The ATB
is known to have suborned agents everywhere, and in the most unexpected places…)
More expose to come.
I’m a bit surprised that Cecil and Una got into a competition on how deadly the Australian fauna is to humans - I would certainly expect an industrialized modern first world country with high literacy rate to take different precautions in avoiding snakes than an overpopulated emerging country like India.
I think another point that Jared Diamond (IIRC) pointed out in one of his books is: why are so many deadly animals - snakes, spiders plus ocean animals - in a relatively small spot globally? His answer was: scarcity. Australia has compared to the other continents, the least minerals for land-based food stuff, and the least nutrients regarding ocean currents, too. So if animals want to eat, they need to improve their success rate over normal animals elsewhere (I think a Cheetah in Africa catches his gazelle only 1-3 times out of 10 attempts), because if they don’t catch anything today, the next prey will only appear several days later, which is too late.
So to make sure that they get to eat today, the animals use venom/ poison to hunt.
That explanation sounds plausible to me.
Although Lynne-42 is an expert on spiders, I would question her saying “you never hear of anyone being bitten”. Well, yes I have. I have not known anyone to become very sick from a bite though.
And a reason people may not be bitten as frequently is that people are so aware of them. In Perth, the bludgers are everywhere so you do need to take care.
Also, there is a theory that they may even have come from RSA so they should not be classified as Australian.
Cite, please. Even if you include traffic accidents where cars hit kangaroos and emus on the road around dawn or dusk, there is no way that “lethal wild animal encounter” is such a significant cause of death in Australia. And while you are looking, here are statistics on Leading Causes of Death - Australia. Nothing related to wild animals is in the top 20. (Incidentally, dementia was the third leading cause of death in 2009.)
Right. If an animal species was only discovered 4 years ago, it’s unlikely to have caused any human deaths (unless it’s so venomous that people just seeing it from a distance die from it).
In the real world
As in dreams
Nothing is ever
Quite what it seems.
(From the Book of Counted Sorrows)
Happy to stand corrected. I haven’t heard of people being bitten because they are pretty timid (the spiders, not the people). But perfectly happy to accept that others do. And agree that people take care, just as we do with snakes.
Grew up in a house in Australia where are backyard was straight onto a massive patch of native bushland and I grew up running around in that bushland. Never bitten by anything, although my father did beat to death with a shovel red belly black snakes when they came into our garden.
We had redbacks and funnelwebs in our garden, but you grow up knowing what they look like and you don’t mess with them.
I also own property in Tasmania that has Black Snakes, Copperheads, Brown Snakes, Whipsnakes and Tiger Snakes on it. I see them whenever I go walking there, but I don’t bother them and they don’t bother me.
Well said, coremelt.
From the article:
From Frank McLynn, The Burma Campaign (2011), p. 13:
“This story … offends every single canon of historical verifiability … as in all urban myths, close investigation involves one in a vicious circle, where one comes back to the same, single, unsubstantiated and unverifiable source … are we seriously to believe that Japanese firepower, which tore such holes in British armour, was helpless against crocodiles? … Most of all, there is a simple zoological problem. If ‘thousands of crocodiles’ were involved in the massacre … how had these ravening monsters survived before and how were they to survive later? … animals are not exempt from the laws of overpopulation.”
I don’t know if Straight Dope readers are also fans of QI (if you don’t know what I’m talking about google QI plus “Stephen Fry”) - they point out that, although direct fatalities from spiders petered out quite a while back in Oz, one does still get indirect casualties arising when people crash whilst trying to fend off a spider.
Stephen Fry would, I’m sure, not make the same mistake that Mr Bryson did in assuming that poisonous=venomous. The former refers to animals which are toxic when ingested - examples being the pufferfish (tetrodotoxin) and the poison arrow frogs (batrachotoxin) you mentioned. Venomous refers to the ability to inject a toxin, be it by bite or sting. I suppose that some venom glands could also be poisonous but this is an optional extra.
While I agree that the story might well have been exaggerated, I imagine having a rifle which stick a bullet through a crocodile is of minimal use when said crocodile has grabbed hold of you. If it has grabbed hold of your pal it is only of more use if you (a) aren’t panicking about where the croc’s pal is (b) can see the croc/your pal in the swamp water (c) aren’t too worried about shooting your pal (d) hit the right spot of the croc (head quite big, brain quite small). I believe crocs will store corpses underneath submerged branches etc to tenderise them so it wouldn’t surprise me that a small number of crocs could do a lot of damage to a large number of humans.
I would agree that there are probably rather a lot of other things capable of killing humans in a Burmese swamp though - the swamp itself being an obvious one. IIRC Japs didn’t have a very high opinion of soldiers who allowed themselves to be captured either, so it might be that those 980 soldiers didn’t all die overnight.
Quoth lynne-42:
Are you sure? They’re known to be quite adept at using the Web.
What, no mention of drop bears?
Shhh! Don’t talk about the drop bears: you’ll scare away all the tourists.
That would make sense if the crocs were ambushing a person - an army isn’t going to save you if you get snatched.
It makes less sense when the claim is that the crocs ambushed a whole army of nearly 1000 men. That’s more like something out of the movie Aliens, than something likely to have actually happened. 
I’d buy “mass suicide, followed by some crocs attracted to all the fresh meat” more than I would “mass killing by crocs”. Like the author notes, the latter is difficult to accept as fact, as it requires improbable numbers of ferocious, man-eating crocs and improbable lack of resistance by the Japanese soldiers, who were of course well-armed. Though there is apparently little evidence that the incident happened at all.
I’m intrigued that New Zealand, a close neighbor to Australia, does not have poisonous animals. The few that are (Euro honey bee, a couple of reclusive spiders from Aus) are all imports. Given the ominous appearance of a lot of their habitats (fern tree forests come to mind) one would think there would be all kinds of venomous creepy crawlers. I don’t think there’s even very much in the way of venomous flora, but I’m not certain of that