The Most Horrifying Ways Nature Can Kill You

Tetrodotoxin. The blue ringed octopus is about the size of a golf ball, a dull little animal that lives in shallow tide pools and looks completely harmless. Every year, tourists in Australia pick one up for a photo with no idea what they're holding. Handle it, and bright blue rings flash across its skin for a

second or two, the only warning before it bites. The bite is so small and painless that most people don't even notice until the poison starts working. That poison is tetrodotoxin, the same toxin found in the pufferfish that Japan serves as a delicacy called fugu. Drop for drop, it's about 1,200 times deadlier than cyanide, and a single

octopus holds enough to kill 26 grown adults. It works by switching off the signals your nerves use to move your muscles, a bit like cutting every wire between your brain and your body. Your lips and face go numb within minutes, then your arms and legs, and finally the muscle you breathe with, until you can't

pull in air at all. The worst part, though, is what the toxin leaves untouched. It never reaches your brain, and your heart keeps beating, so you don't pass out. You stay completely awake while your body goes still around you, unable to move, speak, or even blink to show you're still in there. You

look dead long before you actually are, and there's no antidote and nothing you can do to stop it. Necrotizing fasciitis. It can start with something as small as a paper cut. You go for a swim in the sea or eat a few raw oysters, and a type of bacteria called Vibrio vulnificus gets in through that

cut or the food. It lives in warm coastal water and reaches new places as oceans heat up. For a while, there's nothing to see but a bit of redness and swelling, so most people wait, and waiting is the one thing you can't afford. Once it's inside, the bacteria multiply and pour out toxins that kill