12 Animals Most Likely To Kill You When You Visit The Sunshine State
Edmund Torr
Updated: February 10, 2020
CaptionThe state of Florida is renowned for its beaches, its nightlife, its food...and for being one of the most unusual ecological environments in the world. Thriving in the state’s swamps, marine grasslands, warm Caribbean waters, and cypress forests are a wide variety of some of the scariest, most dangerous, and most fascinating animals to be found anywhere in the country. The CDC, which collects death data, doesn’t provide specific death or injury numbers for individual species, instead grouping them into broader categories like “bees, wasps, and hornets.” Using that CDC list as a base and searching local newspapers, we’ve come up with a list of deadly animals in the Sunshine State.Shutterstock
Black Widow Spider
The black widow—specifically, the southern black widow—thrives in Florida. A spectacularly venomous spider, the black widow is widespread throughout the state. But its reputation is slightly overblown: though it is common and venomous, actual deaths from black widow bites are rare. For one thing, the males can’t inject humans at all. For another, there’s been an antivenom for nearly a century. That said, over 2,000 people per year in the US are bitten by a black spider, and though no deaths have been reported since 1983, they are ridiculously painful and often require hospitalization. The University of Florida notes that the black widow is one of the only potentially fatal spiders in Florida, and the CDC says that 13 deaths were caused by venomous spiders between 1999 and 2017.
