ANIMAL WARS!
Most of us (boys) are constantly thinking up two things and wondering which one would win in a fight. It's what we do; why we're interested in sports, gladiatorial games in the ancient world, cock-fighting and dog fighting in the third world, having better stuff than the neighbors in the developed world, breaking into the clear for a 5-screen touchdown in that little red-blip LED football game, and all the other ugliness (aka coolness) that comes about as a result of this instinct. It must have something to do with studying and sizing up the competition, training and honing our minds and bodies in order to compete successfully for mates. It always comes down to sex in the natural world, ALWAYS. I don't see why this would be any different in more complex species like humans. So somehow this must explain our excitement watching things fight, from stag beetles tied to sticks to human pugilists battling for millions of dollars. I'm not saying I condone or am proud of any of this, I'm just telling the truth as it is.
In addition to being male, I'm an org-chart architectural type who thinks cladistically - in terms of hierarchies and relationships... a big-picture person. I'm a structuralist like Ayn Rand, except I'm not a woman. Not yet. I like alpha cats and things made out of metal. I like castles better than towns, claymores better than cutlasses, Darth Vader's star destroyer better than the smaller variety. I like to know who is the king, who are his vassals, and who are their serfs, and then make a cool chart of it in Visio with little shaded boxes that look like they're floating just above the page. I like there to be a clear relationship, a definite winner and a loser, just like in Vietnam and Iraq.
Bring all this together and naturally from a young age I started wondering... if we consider all the animals in the world, which of them would emerge from a single-elimination tourney to be the ultimate champ? What is the single toughest animal on the planet? And what interesting beat-downs would we see in the intermediate stages that might surprise us? I couldn't get all the animals in the world to volunteer, so instead I'm taking 32 of the most irritable, biggest, meanest, hairiest, snarlingest, saltiest, bubble-blowingest, mind-blowingestly cool animals our planet has to offer, and pitting them against each other Pokémon style, except with totally different rules.
I would never sanction any animal fighting in reality of course, but in the realm of the mind (dumped to a blog), anything is possible and it's neither illegal nor cruel! In this blog entry I will lay the ground rules for the selection process and the fights themselves, and at last trot out our 32 lucky combatants. Humans are excluded from this event because of a unique problem: allow them to use tools and they'll win the tourney (except this one kid in school that was such a fag); take away tool use and clothing and they'll lose to almost any of the animals here. And as arbiter and tourney ultimate grand wizard overseer demi-person, I have to remain neutral, so it's better to just get Biblical for a little while and not consider humans as animals, at least until the tourney is over, when they can get their Homo status back. As in sapiens, you pervs.
There's the "ideal" case. If you had a list in front of you beforehand of the top 32 animals ranked best to worst, you could take every fourth one (1, 5, 9, etc) and make Region 1. Region 2 would get (2, 6, 10, etc). Region 3 gets (3, 7, 11, etc), and Region 4 gets (4, 8, 12 etc). With me so far? Then, within each region, 1 faces 8, 2 faces 7, 3 faces 6, etc. The next round pits the remaining highest seed with the remaining lowest seed. One winner would eventually emerge from each region, and if you seeded them properly and luck were not a factor, it would be the 1, 2, 3, and 4 animals on the original list. Then 1 would face and beat 4, 2 would beat 3; those are the semifinals. Lastly, 1 beats 2 for the title. For more on the theory of tournament seeding, see a nice little article HERE.
This is the basic format we'll use, but there are considerations and qualifications that need to be taken into account. First of all, we don't want a field of 32 that's half full of sharks, or all big cats, bears, and jackalopes, or any one group being overrepresented. That would be dull. It's much more interesting to have animals of all shapes and sizes compete. So even though it's a move away from that "ideal" list of 32, the idea here is to get as a good spread from different genera, physical locations, and domains (air, land, sea) as possible, while still trying to get competitive fighters that maybe make up for bulk with unique abilities like venom, stealth, speed, and so on. I decided on a number of "types" of animals, for example a "buffalo/bison/cow/yak" type, a "big cat" type, and so on. Then I picked the two toughest representatives from that type (usually, but you'll read about some exceptions in a bit). There's no way around this step being almost completely subjective, but I made educated guesses and in most cases the dominant members of a type were obvious. Some required a little internet research. It was harder having to leave out lots of fascinating animals than it was selecting good candidates, naturally, but one has to draw the line somewhere and I drew it to make sure wild American mustangs were not represented.
IMPORTANT DECISION 2: We're not going to play the game of scaling up small animals to match larger ones. There's no pound-for-pound considerations in nature, right? That's great and all that a certain critter packs a huge punch "for his size." But if he's small, even this miniature Superman is likely to get owned by something way bigger. It might not be fair, but it's physics. Being big and strong is going to help you if you're an animal out in the wild (the checks-and-balances part being that there has to be enough food in the ecosystem to support all that mass), and it's gonna seriously help you in this contest. This tourney isn't about what animal would be the baddest on some alternate earth where everything is the exact same size, dumbass, it's about which real animal would win in a head-to-head fight. An imaginary head-to-head fight. Period.
IMPORTANT DECISION 3: The only place we're going to have to get creative is when we talk about animals from different domains: land, air, and sea. Some of these animals couldn't actually fight one another in reality, while some matchups that are possible might result in different outcomes depending on the kind of environment in which the battle took place. For example, a wolf and a shark could never fight. And a crocodile and a tiger brawl might have different outcomes depending on whether they fought in a stream or on land. Tigers are cool.
To overcome this difficulty, we're going to have to imagine a fight in which each creature is fighting in the comfort of its natural environment. In other words, we can imagine a battle between a shark and a wolf in which the shark is able to have the same mobility it would in the water (a 3D space), and a wolf would have the same traction and leaping ability it does on land (It wouldn't have to swim while fighting). Each side is allowed its accustomed attacking and defensive styles and is not penalized for being out of its territory. You just have to imagine it in your head. When these situations arise during the contest I will reiterate this and you'll see how it works. For a brief time I considered making separate water, land, and air champions, but that proved more problematic and less fun. We want ONE champ!
We start off with the big cats, some of the most ruthless and efficient predators on earth. I think everyone in the room will agree that lions and tigers are the tops in that category (ligers are sterile hybrids like mules, and are disallowed). Specifically, the male African lion and the male Siberian tiger.
Next we might as well talk about bears. Bears are big and mean, and the biggest and meanest of all are the Polar bear and the Kodiak bear (a brown bear even bigger and fiercer than the grizzly). No real controversies there.
Some animals are not known for being predatory but are nonetheless savage fighters either because of their bulk or their armaments, or both. In this category we find the Hippopotamus and the Walrus. Another gentle giant that can nonetheless become ferocious if you give it a good reason to (like showing up) is the Gorilla. That really is the only primate worthy of making this list (sad, huh?).
The largest animals in the safari are the African elephant and the White rhinoceros. But the White rhino is much less savage than the slightly smaller but more irritated Black rhino, so we'll swap in the Black Rhinoceros instead. These represent the biggest and baddest the Serengeti has to offer. While elephants are usually depicted as more noble than aggressive, they certainly don't like to be threatened or bullied at the drinking hole, or have their young so much as looked at. Did I mention they're big? In fact, they're the most massive land animals on earth. And black rhinos... well, they're just angry critters all around.
So far all we've talked about are mammals. What about reptiles? Excluding snakes for the moment, the top reptiles would seem to be the Saltwater crocodile (way bigger than the largest alligator or obviously any caimans) and the toppermost monitor lizard, or dragon, found on Komodo and a few nearby islands. The biggest "salties" come surprisingly not from the Nile but from the open water around Australia. And the Komodo dragon could easily kill an average unarmed human being, and has done so many times in the past—seriously.
Snakes come in two basic varieties: venomous and constricting. For venomous snakes, we'll take the King cobra and Black mamba. Sea snakes, which have perhaps the nastiest venom of all, might be miffed at the snub, but their tiny teeth can't actually inject any of that venom into anything the size of a human being or larger, so they're out. A few other snakes (mostly pit vipers) have deadlier venom, or are bigger, or are more aggressive, but not all three in the combinations that these two are noted for. Also, they're well recognized by most people, at least as names. Selecting rare South American pit vipers and such just would just muddy the water; we're trying to keep this accurate but not so scientific we'd have to consult the ghost of Linnaeus to even refer to our gladiators by name.
Constrictors will be represented by the Burmese python of alligator-eating fame and the South American Green anaconda. With no venom, the deadliness of a constrictor is a simple function of size, and these two are the largest and strongest of them all. Burmese pythons usually top out a little bit longer; Green anacondas are bulkier around the middle and have bigger noggins to unhinge. Both give people nightmares.
Turning strictly to the water now, we have three sharks, two mammals, and one mollusk that I see as being the tops in the business. Those are the Great white shark, Tiger shark, and Bull shark, the Orca (killer whale), the Sperm whale, and the Colossal squid. I went with an extra shark rather than try to throw a sacrificial mollusk like the Giant Pacific Octopus onto the menu just for symmetry (Dear 'OCD' Diary: I'm getting better!). As for the sperm whale (no laughing please, it's rude), there are several larger whale species out there, but they are all baleen whales and therefore pretty much incapable of doing anything against toothy creatures except swim away. And swimming away is not what this is about. The sharks you could debate a little; supposedly pelagic (open-water) white-tips are unusually aggressive. But I'm comfortable most people would find my three choices clearly have the right stuff when it comes not just to starting fights, but winning them.
We've got land and sea animals, so we'd might as well get some representative from the air. The largest birds alive are the California condor and the Andean Condor, but they're basically scavengers, like huge turkey vultures. Bollocks. After reading more than I wanted to about birds (did you know the Peregrine falcon in an attack dive is the fastest animal in the world? (except for whatever it's diving after, lol)), it seems agreed upon that birds of prey are naturally the best fighters, and the top birds of prey (a family which includes falcons, hawks, owls, and so on), are the eagles. No, not the band. It is also remarkably almost unanimously agreed that the most powerful eagle (that which kills the biggest and most dangerous prey) is the Harpy Eagle of South Africa.
There are about three or four candidates for the #2 spot; but I'm gonna go a whole different route and instead of picking a slightly-less-mean eagle (what's the point if it's not as tough as the Harpy?), I'll take the most massive bird on the planet, the flightless but certainly formidable Ostrich. It doesn't have to be able to fly to compete, remember. It fights in its own natural environment as far as this contest goes. Has anyone else seen Animals Are Beautiful People or other shows where ostriches run around defending their nests from would-be egg burglars? Dem birds is MEAN!! I'm curious to see how their completely different fighting technique (from the eagle's) will fare in this competition.
Squids aren't the only invertebrates we should consider. What about spiders? Something this small obviously is going to succeed or fail by its venom alone. Several factors come into play when evaluating toxic animals. How strong is the toxin? How generalized is it (does it affect only certain other organisms or is it nonspecific? How much venom does the spider carry? How good is the spider at actually transferring the toxin to its opponent (what is its attack speed, bite depth, how much venom actually gets injected on average as a percentile of its arsenal, etc.), how fast-acting is the toxin, how aggressive is the spider (and willing to use its weapon), and how many things does it actually get a chance to kill where it lives?
We can ignore the last question because we're delivering its combatants right to its doorstep. So it need not be a common city spider that kills a lot of people statistically just because of where it lives. But taking the other considerations into account (ok, yes, I made a little table of candidates and rated them on each trait according to Wikipedia and more so the science journals I found linked to in the footnotes), I honed in on the best overall killing machines. I infiltrated my way into the inner circle of arachnophiliacs. What you find is a group of "experts" who agree even less than venomous snake experts. But two names I kept hearing: The Wandering Brazilian spider, and the male Australian Funnel Web spider. These came in clearly ahead of all other contenders with the blend of size, aggressiveness, toxicity, and so on lumped as a package. Do your own research if you don't trust me (always a good idea anyway). You'll probably come to the same conclusion I did—these are spiders that make the famous Black Widow and Brown Recluse look like ladybirds in comparison. I'll take one each, please.
I'm not going to consider things like malaria-carrying mosquitoes or plagued rats, because this contest is about gladiatorial prowess and not long-term death from disease. No diseases or vectors of any kind make the list, even fast-acting ones like Ebola or smallpox. It's really a whole different type of battle, and it's gross anyway. Similarly worms, mites, lice, and all other parasites are RIGHT OUT.
So let's see, to finish up the venomous critters, I'll grab some other nasties representative of the variety out there and, once again, in the upper magnitude of toxicity. Box jellyfish, also called sea wasps, have killed 5,567 people since 1884, and the venom present on their stinging cells is considered by most to be the deadliest in the animal kingdom (bringing us back to the nebulous definition of words like "deadliest"). Because I wanted them to (and have my reasons), the famous Portuguese man-o'-war and the Stonefish have RSVP'd to my invitation. This rounds out the retinue of our aquatic friends in style. Victory in this bracket will depend little on strength, nor solely on strength of venom, but also on how it's delivered and what defenses exist, if any. Should be the most interesting bracket to watch in terms of tactics.
Finishing up the required slots with a few miscellaneous land animals, we need to get the infamous Hyena on the playing field at least for a laugh or two, persuade a ticked-off Wild boar to participate, challenge the Fat-tailed scorpion to a noble duel, pique the interest of the North American Timber wolf, and harass the Cape buffalo till it throws in its lot with us. It's done.... All aboard!
Next post: See the actual bracket with the animals loaded and ready to go, and maybe even begin the first round! Time to sound off though. Would you like to post your predictions after seeing the bracket (where first rounds matchups are shown but subsequent pairings are left to your imagination), or would you prefer just to passively watch as I unfold the results every few days? Ideally we'd have a large betting pool on this, but alas, "What noisy cats are we" (I have few viewers). I will give you a few days after I post the bracket to send in your prediction of the ultimate winner, the full results of each round or something in between, it's all up to you!
INTRODUCTION
When you're little you think nature films are great and animals are so cute. Then you grow up and you realize that everything just eats everything else, especially the young and the old and infirm. It's brutal but it's the way it is. I love and respect the diversity of animal life on this planet, and would like to spend my life helping to make some small difference in conserving vital species and ecosystems, whether actively in the field or by donating to causes and such. I would never purposely kill any animal except insects. Those I try to kill every chance I get. Insects are evil and already out-mass all vertebrate and plant life put together many times over. Far from being endangered, they are always on the rise; despite attempts at eradicating many as pests, the human race has never driven a single species of insect to extinction. So you'll excuse me if my sympathies lie toward the endangered large mammals, birds, and sea life. Remember—Hulk good, insects bad.Most of us (boys) are constantly thinking up two things and wondering which one would win in a fight. It's what we do; why we're interested in sports, gladiatorial games in the ancient world, cock-fighting and dog fighting in the third world, having better stuff than the neighbors in the developed world, breaking into the clear for a 5-screen touchdown in that little red-blip LED football game, and all the other ugliness (aka coolness) that comes about as a result of this instinct. It must have something to do with studying and sizing up the competition, training and honing our minds and bodies in order to compete successfully for mates. It always comes down to sex in the natural world, ALWAYS. I don't see why this would be any different in more complex species like humans. So somehow this must explain our excitement watching things fight, from stag beetles tied to sticks to human pugilists battling for millions of dollars. I'm not saying I condone or am proud of any of this, I'm just telling the truth as it is.
In addition to being male, I'm an org-chart architectural type who thinks cladistically - in terms of hierarchies and relationships... a big-picture person. I'm a structuralist like Ayn Rand, except I'm not a woman. Not yet. I like alpha cats and things made out of metal. I like castles better than towns, claymores better than cutlasses, Darth Vader's star destroyer better than the smaller variety. I like to know who is the king, who are his vassals, and who are their serfs, and then make a cool chart of it in Visio with little shaded boxes that look like they're floating just above the page. I like there to be a clear relationship, a definite winner and a loser, just like in Vietnam and Iraq.
Bring all this together and naturally from a young age I started wondering... if we consider all the animals in the world, which of them would emerge from a single-elimination tourney to be the ultimate champ? What is the single toughest animal on the planet? And what interesting beat-downs would we see in the intermediate stages that might surprise us? I couldn't get all the animals in the world to volunteer, so instead I'm taking 32 of the most irritable, biggest, meanest, hairiest, snarlingest, saltiest, bubble-blowingest, mind-blowingestly cool animals our planet has to offer, and pitting them against each other Pokémon style, except with totally different rules.
I would never sanction any animal fighting in reality of course, but in the realm of the mind (dumped to a blog), anything is possible and it's neither illegal nor cruel! In this blog entry I will lay the ground rules for the selection process and the fights themselves, and at last trot out our 32 lucky combatants. Humans are excluded from this event because of a unique problem: allow them to use tools and they'll win the tourney (except this one kid in school that was such a fag); take away tool use and clothing and they'll lose to almost any of the animals here. And as arbiter and tourney ultimate grand wizard overseer demi-person, I have to remain neutral, so it's better to just get Biblical for a little while and not consider humans as animals, at least until the tourney is over, when they can get their Homo status back. As in sapiens, you pervs.
THE SELECTION PROCESS
As mentioned in a previous post, I decided on an NCAA men's basketball style tournament bracket for this competition, if that means anything to you. Basically I decided a reasonable number of animals to start with would be 32 (2×105, or five rounds of paired fights), divided into four regions - Black, Grey, Red, and Clear. Each region shall (hopefully) receive a representative sample of contenders out of the 32, from top to bottom. Meaning, each region should have approximately the same "combined" level of strength, give or take some for the vagaries of real biology. The best to emerge from each region should be battle-hardened ass-kicking brutes. Or maybe just really poisonous or something.There's the "ideal" case. If you had a list in front of you beforehand of the top 32 animals ranked best to worst, you could take every fourth one (1, 5, 9, etc) and make Region 1. Region 2 would get (2, 6, 10, etc). Region 3 gets (3, 7, 11, etc), and Region 4 gets (4, 8, 12 etc). With me so far? Then, within each region, 1 faces 8, 2 faces 7, 3 faces 6, etc. The next round pits the remaining highest seed with the remaining lowest seed. One winner would eventually emerge from each region, and if you seeded them properly and luck were not a factor, it would be the 1, 2, 3, and 4 animals on the original list. Then 1 would face and beat 4, 2 would beat 3; those are the semifinals. Lastly, 1 beats 2 for the title. For more on the theory of tournament seeding, see a nice little article HERE.
This is the basic format we'll use, but there are considerations and qualifications that need to be taken into account. First of all, we don't want a field of 32 that's half full of sharks, or all big cats, bears, and jackalopes, or any one group being overrepresented. That would be dull. It's much more interesting to have animals of all shapes and sizes compete. So even though it's a move away from that "ideal" list of 32, the idea here is to get as a good spread from different genera, physical locations, and domains (air, land, sea) as possible, while still trying to get competitive fighters that maybe make up for bulk with unique abilities like venom, stealth, speed, and so on. I decided on a number of "types" of animals, for example a "buffalo/bison/cow/yak" type, a "big cat" type, and so on. Then I picked the two toughest representatives from that type (usually, but you'll read about some exceptions in a bit). There's no way around this step being almost completely subjective, but I made educated guesses and in most cases the dominant members of a type were obvious. Some required a little internet research. It was harder having to leave out lots of fascinating animals than it was selecting good candidates, naturally, but one has to draw the line somewhere and I drew it to make sure wild American mustangs were not represented.
METHODOLOGY
IMPORTANT DECISION 1: This contest isn't about packs or schools or flocks; it's all about one-on-one competition. One individual animal of that species gets to fight. Insects totally get the shaft here, but I hate insects, so who cares. Same with vermin. Look at it this way. What gets people excited in the movie theater? The 4,000 orcs running around with spears and axes, or the BIG ASS DRAGON that comes out of nowhere screaming its head off and making everyone poop their pants? Case closed. If this also hurts the chances of middle- and large-size pack hunters like wolves or even orcas, then tough titties (besides, even one orca is no joke). I want something to emerge I can parade around like King Kong, ripping people off and getting rich doing it, and no one's gonna pay to watch some whiny wolves hide and ambush stuff. They want beefcakes. Got it?IMPORTANT DECISION 2: We're not going to play the game of scaling up small animals to match larger ones. There's no pound-for-pound considerations in nature, right? That's great and all that a certain critter packs a huge punch "for his size." But if he's small, even this miniature Superman is likely to get owned by something way bigger. It might not be fair, but it's physics. Being big and strong is going to help you if you're an animal out in the wild (the checks-and-balances part being that there has to be enough food in the ecosystem to support all that mass), and it's gonna seriously help you in this contest. This tourney isn't about what animal would be the baddest on some alternate earth where everything is the exact same size, dumbass, it's about which real animal would win in a head-to-head fight. An imaginary head-to-head fight. Period.
IMPORTANT DECISION 3: The only place we're going to have to get creative is when we talk about animals from different domains: land, air, and sea. Some of these animals couldn't actually fight one another in reality, while some matchups that are possible might result in different outcomes depending on the kind of environment in which the battle took place. For example, a wolf and a shark could never fight. And a crocodile and a tiger brawl might have different outcomes depending on whether they fought in a stream or on land. Tigers are cool.
To overcome this difficulty, we're going to have to imagine a fight in which each creature is fighting in the comfort of its natural environment. In other words, we can imagine a battle between a shark and a wolf in which the shark is able to have the same mobility it would in the water (a 3D space), and a wolf would have the same traction and leaping ability it does on land (It wouldn't have to swim while fighting). Each side is allowed its accustomed attacking and defensive styles and is not penalized for being out of its territory. You just have to imagine it in your head. When these situations arise during the contest I will reiterate this and you'll see how it works. For a brief time I considered making separate water, land, and air champions, but that proved more problematic and less fun. We want ONE champ!
THE ANIMALS!
Now that the technicalities are out of the way, let's introduce our 32 candidates. I'm going to briefly explain the reason for each selection as we go, so there are fewer "how did animal X get in there instead of Y?" comments. If nevertheless you find you have those questions, or any others, feel free to comment.We start off with the big cats, some of the most ruthless and efficient predators on earth. I think everyone in the room will agree that lions and tigers are the tops in that category (ligers are sterile hybrids like mules, and are disallowed). Specifically, the male African lion and the male Siberian tiger.
Next we might as well talk about bears. Bears are big and mean, and the biggest and meanest of all are the Polar bear and the Kodiak bear (a brown bear even bigger and fiercer than the grizzly). No real controversies there.
Some animals are not known for being predatory but are nonetheless savage fighters either because of their bulk or their armaments, or both. In this category we find the Hippopotamus and the Walrus. Another gentle giant that can nonetheless become ferocious if you give it a good reason to (like showing up) is the Gorilla. That really is the only primate worthy of making this list (sad, huh?).
The largest animals in the safari are the African elephant and the White rhinoceros. But the White rhino is much less savage than the slightly smaller but more irritated Black rhino, so we'll swap in the Black Rhinoceros instead. These represent the biggest and baddest the Serengeti has to offer. While elephants are usually depicted as more noble than aggressive, they certainly don't like to be threatened or bullied at the drinking hole, or have their young so much as looked at. Did I mention they're big? In fact, they're the most massive land animals on earth. And black rhinos... well, they're just angry critters all around.
So far all we've talked about are mammals. What about reptiles? Excluding snakes for the moment, the top reptiles would seem to be the Saltwater crocodile (way bigger than the largest alligator or obviously any caimans) and the toppermost monitor lizard, or dragon, found on Komodo and a few nearby islands. The biggest "salties" come surprisingly not from the Nile but from the open water around Australia. And the Komodo dragon could easily kill an average unarmed human being, and has done so many times in the past—seriously.
Snakes come in two basic varieties: venomous and constricting. For venomous snakes, we'll take the King cobra and Black mamba. Sea snakes, which have perhaps the nastiest venom of all, might be miffed at the snub, but their tiny teeth can't actually inject any of that venom into anything the size of a human being or larger, so they're out. A few other snakes (mostly pit vipers) have deadlier venom, or are bigger, or are more aggressive, but not all three in the combinations that these two are noted for. Also, they're well recognized by most people, at least as names. Selecting rare South American pit vipers and such just would just muddy the water; we're trying to keep this accurate but not so scientific we'd have to consult the ghost of Linnaeus to even refer to our gladiators by name.
Constrictors will be represented by the Burmese python of alligator-eating fame and the South American Green anaconda. With no venom, the deadliness of a constrictor is a simple function of size, and these two are the largest and strongest of them all. Burmese pythons usually top out a little bit longer; Green anacondas are bulkier around the middle and have bigger noggins to unhinge. Both give people nightmares.
Turning strictly to the water now, we have three sharks, two mammals, and one mollusk that I see as being the tops in the business. Those are the Great white shark, Tiger shark, and Bull shark, the Orca (killer whale), the Sperm whale, and the Colossal squid. I went with an extra shark rather than try to throw a sacrificial mollusk like the Giant Pacific Octopus onto the menu just for symmetry (Dear 'OCD' Diary: I'm getting better!). As for the sperm whale (no laughing please, it's rude), there are several larger whale species out there, but they are all baleen whales and therefore pretty much incapable of doing anything against toothy creatures except swim away. And swimming away is not what this is about. The sharks you could debate a little; supposedly pelagic (open-water) white-tips are unusually aggressive. But I'm comfortable most people would find my three choices clearly have the right stuff when it comes not just to starting fights, but winning them.
We've got land and sea animals, so we'd might as well get some representative from the air. The largest birds alive are the California condor and the Andean Condor, but they're basically scavengers, like huge turkey vultures. Bollocks. After reading more than I wanted to about birds (did you know the Peregrine falcon in an attack dive is the fastest animal in the world? (except for whatever it's diving after, lol)), it seems agreed upon that birds of prey are naturally the best fighters, and the top birds of prey (a family which includes falcons, hawks, owls, and so on), are the eagles. No, not the band. It is also remarkably almost unanimously agreed that the most powerful eagle (that which kills the biggest and most dangerous prey) is the Harpy Eagle of South Africa.
There are about three or four candidates for the #2 spot; but I'm gonna go a whole different route and instead of picking a slightly-less-mean eagle (what's the point if it's not as tough as the Harpy?), I'll take the most massive bird on the planet, the flightless but certainly formidable Ostrich. It doesn't have to be able to fly to compete, remember. It fights in its own natural environment as far as this contest goes. Has anyone else seen Animals Are Beautiful People or other shows where ostriches run around defending their nests from would-be egg burglars? Dem birds is MEAN!! I'm curious to see how their completely different fighting technique (from the eagle's) will fare in this competition.
Squids aren't the only invertebrates we should consider. What about spiders? Something this small obviously is going to succeed or fail by its venom alone. Several factors come into play when evaluating toxic animals. How strong is the toxin? How generalized is it (does it affect only certain other organisms or is it nonspecific? How much venom does the spider carry? How good is the spider at actually transferring the toxin to its opponent (what is its attack speed, bite depth, how much venom actually gets injected on average as a percentile of its arsenal, etc.), how fast-acting is the toxin, how aggressive is the spider (and willing to use its weapon), and how many things does it actually get a chance to kill where it lives?
We can ignore the last question because we're delivering its combatants right to its doorstep. So it need not be a common city spider that kills a lot of people statistically just because of where it lives. But taking the other considerations into account (ok, yes, I made a little table of candidates and rated them on each trait according to Wikipedia and more so the science journals I found linked to in the footnotes), I honed in on the best overall killing machines. I infiltrated my way into the inner circle of arachnophiliacs. What you find is a group of "experts" who agree even less than venomous snake experts. But two names I kept hearing: The Wandering Brazilian spider, and the male Australian Funnel Web spider. These came in clearly ahead of all other contenders with the blend of size, aggressiveness, toxicity, and so on lumped as a package. Do your own research if you don't trust me (always a good idea anyway). You'll probably come to the same conclusion I did—these are spiders that make the famous Black Widow and Brown Recluse look like ladybirds in comparison. I'll take one each, please.
I'm not going to consider things like malaria-carrying mosquitoes or plagued rats, because this contest is about gladiatorial prowess and not long-term death from disease. No diseases or vectors of any kind make the list, even fast-acting ones like Ebola or smallpox. It's really a whole different type of battle, and it's gross anyway. Similarly worms, mites, lice, and all other parasites are RIGHT OUT.
So let's see, to finish up the venomous critters, I'll grab some other nasties representative of the variety out there and, once again, in the upper magnitude of toxicity. Box jellyfish, also called sea wasps, have killed 5,567 people since 1884, and the venom present on their stinging cells is considered by most to be the deadliest in the animal kingdom (bringing us back to the nebulous definition of words like "deadliest"). Because I wanted them to (and have my reasons), the famous Portuguese man-o'-war and the Stonefish have RSVP'd to my invitation. This rounds out the retinue of our aquatic friends in style. Victory in this bracket will depend little on strength, nor solely on strength of venom, but also on how it's delivered and what defenses exist, if any. Should be the most interesting bracket to watch in terms of tactics.
Finishing up the required slots with a few miscellaneous land animals, we need to get the infamous Hyena on the playing field at least for a laugh or two, persuade a ticked-off Wild boar to participate, challenge the Fat-tailed scorpion to a noble duel, pique the interest of the North American Timber wolf, and harass the Cape buffalo till it throws in its lot with us. It's done.... All aboard!
Next post: See the actual bracket with the animals loaded and ready to go, and maybe even begin the first round! Time to sound off though. Would you like to post your predictions after seeing the bracket (where first rounds matchups are shown but subsequent pairings are left to your imagination), or would you prefer just to passively watch as I unfold the results every few days? Ideally we'd have a large betting pool on this, but alas, "What noisy cats are we" (I have few viewers). I will give you a few days after I post the bracket to send in your prediction of the ultimate winner, the full results of each round or something in between, it's all up to you!
4 comments:
I think I'm gonna opt out of this one, which may be a pity because you've obviously thought out this whole contest really thoroughly. However I think I'm going to leave it to all you guys who enjoy testosterone fuelled team sports, to which I really can't relate. I've tried, honest! Rex will bear witness to my early feeble attempts to be supportive of his cricket team. These attempts usually involved me sitting doing the Guardian crossword and then sneaking off for a nap in the car while the guys finished up running around in their grubby whites. Pathetic I know, but give me a good book any day.
My post didn't show up, but I'm in - not for sport and the blood and the gore....just curious and obviously it's about stategy which I detest really, but I love animals, so I'm "game". I don't quite understand how this is going to work, so I'll decide after I see the first arena. I like the idea of predictions (assuming you've already narrowed everything down to one, for reasons unknown to us?). How will this be judged is my real question.
Don't really like the idea of animal bloodshed, but I'm waiting for the details.
magdalene: understandable and sensible. And cricket is a weird sport for sure.
empath: don't worry, it will all be clear by the next post.
bytedoc: it's not real bloodshed, and I won't be concentrating on battle details anyway, more just like an analysis of which would win and why, and hopefully people (me included) learn a little about these animals in the process.
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