I’ve tried to look this up but most sites talk about which animals kill the most humans and come up with unsatisfying answers like mosquitoes or amoebas. I want to know which animal actually hunts and eats the most humans. Crocs? Tigers? Sharks? Leopards?
Males on the prowl on a Saturday night?
It might be true that Hippos kill the most humans but its disqualified because the OP is asking which animals EAT the most humans. Hippos being (mostly) herbivorous wouldn’t count.
Hippos bite, but don’t chew and swallow humans, and thus don’t count. In reading about this, one page I read said leopards eat the most humans, and the other said crocodiles. C’mon, help me out dopers!
I did find this list of the top 10 individual man-eaters in history and if it’s true that one croc alone has been responsible for 300 humans than that’s quite a powerful case for crocs: Top 10 Worst Man Eaters In History - Listverse
Can’t find anything that directly answers your question though yet.
Edit: the numbers quoted in that link are probably exaggerated hugely.
Just as a (barely) educated wild guess, I would bet that there are a LOT more crocodiles than leopards, worldwide…
tigers have been said to be the most common consumer of humans. they stalk silently and attack from behind, killing instantly. in rural india, in tiger country, villagers will wear face masks on the back of their heads to discourage attacks. calvin and hobbes covered this issue once upon a time…
A WAG but maybe it’s rats. There’s probably a lot more contact between people and rats than there is between people and tigers or leopards or crocodiles or sharks.
If you count it as total mass of human flesh consumed, rather than number of people, it’s probably mosquitoes.
I wonder how many kilos of human blood are scarfed down annually by mosquitoes?
Or maybe dust mites. Mosquitoes usually have other food sources and it’s just the females that drink blood as an extra nutrient boost for egg development. Dust mites survive entirely by eating human skin.
No, no, no. Mosquitoes and mites might suck on us a little, but they don’t really eat us. After you get eaten, you are dead.
Carrion beetles? [As in eating after death, vs. causing it in the first place]
Damn, you beat me too it except I was going to say worms. (I mean after you die something has got to eat you. Then again that might be more fungus and bacteria.)
Grrrr… you people are so annoying! I mean eat a person to cause their death. Like a shark or a lion. Not no fricken’ carrion beetles or mosquitoes or even hippos.
Then I’m sticking with rats. They do kill and eat people (admittedly children and people who are sick or injured).
Butterflies.
Because NOBODY suspects the butterfly!
I vote humans eat the most humans
How about endoparasites such as hookworms? Over the lifetime of a host, they consume a lot of biomass-