THE DEADLIEST ANIMALS ON EARTH

There are lots of dangerous animals out there, but not all of nature's human-killers are big and scary. In fact, the deadliest are so small you rarely notice them until it's too late...

- GRAHAM BARLOW

Nature, as Alfred Tennyson once famously wrote, is red in tooth and claw.

But while Mother Nature has seen fit to equip even small mammals with said teeth and claws, humans are surprisingly defenceless in comparison. Even fighting off something as relatively small as an angry ferret poses a challenge to hairless apes like us. We've made up for it with our big brains and ability to use tools, of course, becoming the dominant animal on the planet pretty much as soon as we made it out of Africa. But take away our guns and put us face to face with an angry predator and we're pretty much entirely at their mercy. Thousands of years of human population expansion have pushed most of the truly fearsome members of the animal kingdom either to extinction or to the outer reaches of our habitats. But some are still out there, and when we do encounter them, the results aren't pretty.

POISONOUS PLANTS THAT CAN KILL

Not everything in the shrubbery is as innocent as it might look, as these plants attest. One of the most poisonous forms of vegetation in the world is the humble castor oil plant. Despite being found in gardens all over the world, the plant's seeds are dangerous, harbouring ricin - an incredibly toxic chemical. On average, just four to eight seeds are all it takes to wipe you out. Death is a slow process, taking up to five days if untreated. Ingesting belladonna, or deadly nightshade, as it's often known, results in a much swifter death. Just two to five berries or a single leaf can be fatal.