What is the baddest animal on earth?

Pound for pound…mosquitos are responsible for more deaths than even humans. We are fortunate to not have malaria here.

as far as land animals, what animal would fuck with a healthy African bull elephant while it was in must and dripping with sebum?

absolutely nothing, except maybe another african bull elephant, also in must..

and as far as sea creatures, one on one, what healthy sea creature would no other sea creature willingly dare to fuck with? (giant squid do, but not by choice..)
the biggest and baddest toothed whale on the high seas, a healthy fully grown bull sperm whale.

but the baddest predators on the high seas are for sure orcas. similar to lions, they hunt in packs that make them especially dangerous. i've seen tiger sharks hide behind a boat, great whites abandon hunting grounds, and they even took down a fully grown blue whale, the biggest animal ever found on earth. and they only eat the tongue. frickin fetishy. and tough to watch, actually. those fuckers are ruthless.

Bremer Orca Blue Whale Hunt
https://youtu.be/Aoz78QeHneQ

still thinking about pound for pound tho..

Jehovah's witness are the worst, followed closely by Scientologists.

^^^ Ha!! D_J for the win.

Jehovah's witness are the worst, followed closely by Scientologists. Originally Posted by DEAR_JOHN

is that in the no weight class category, or pound for pound..

Mic Drop Originally Posted by boardman

i think we may have our pound for pound winner. who knew..

Put the kitty in the water with the gator. That paw slap and retreat wont work in the water.
Heck one thems big channel catfishes might eat that land cat. Im talking bout the big ones that you dont wanna find when noodling.

Some type of apex predator has made it to the top of their environment. Lots are bad ass in their own way. I was thinking of a wolverine.
A bad ass predator has to know when to haul ass to live to fight another day.

i think i found a winner in the pound for pound. this tiny critter is a total badass and even gets its own phylum. stay tuned..

@tig: wolverine is a true bad mofo, no doubt. who wins if a wolverine and a honey badger fight over a deer carcass, assuming their territories overlap?

The only true contenders are Apex predators

The lowly tardigrade, also called water bears
weighing in at a miniscule 1.75 nanograms (a billionth of a gram) and no bigger than 5/100ths of an inch in length. (they are barely visible to the naked eye, but are best viewed under a light microscope.)

these bad boys get their own phylum, so they are classified as:
Kingdom Animalia
Phylum Tardigrada (our phylum is Mammalia)

have been around for 500 million years and have survived 5 mass extinctions, no prob..
their bodies consist of repeating units of head, so they have no thorax or abdomen (weird!)

these chubby looking baddies can survive, well, pretty much anything, including for up to 100 years:
-no water
-no food
-no oxygen
-radiation 1000x higher than a lethal human dose (and have healthy babies after)
-boiling in water
-boiling in alcohol
-toxic chemicals
-the vacuum and radiation of space (1st trial was in 2007)
-pressure 6x greater than in the deepest part of the ocean
-temps as low as -458F and as high as 304F
-extreme salinity

when shit goes south, they enter a state of suspended animation where all their metabolism stops, called cryptobiosis-or the tun state-and they can just chill like this for up to 100 years until conditions improve. they use a sugar called trehalose to replace all their water in this state of dormancy, and apparently this shit must work pretty well...

when conditions improve, they can be back to all their normal activities within just a couple of hours..

if we manage to off our own species through environmental degradation, nuclear war, etc., i would need to go all in water bears being the ultimate survivor, even over cockroaches..

one correction: we are actually phylum Chordata-cord animals, and class mammalia.
tardigrades are bad enough to get their own phylum, tardigrada.
one other wacky factoid: under favorable conditions, they only live about 2 and a half years.

In the pound for pound category, as an honorable mention, I'd like to nominate the lowly fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. These baddies have solved the problem of spontaneous generation. Bear with me now, before you scoff at such a lowly fly receiving such high acclaim.

This isn't the first time this has happened, so it's not like it's some kind of one off. These fuckers can spontaneously generate. Turns out Aristotle was right, which isn't surprising. It's like saying Einstein was right. umm, if it has to do with theoretical physics, I could imagine worse bets than saying einstein is probably gonna end up being right when it's all said and done. and memo to albert: damn straight God plays dice with the universe. the dude's immortal, and without some dice for playing with the universe around, that shit can get old quickly..

So I buy a dozen apples on on sale at fiesta. i only buy shit on sale there, unless it's simply a must-have, like Pace Picante, Hot. Fuck that medium shit. Hot is the bare minimum I can muster.

So I take my dozen apples home, wash them thoroughly, and put them in the fridge at 33 degrees F. Now first, no chance D. melanogaster eggs can survive my washing them. Like, I'm ocd, washing shit is a high art and science in my book. i use dawn and a pressure washer to clean my freakin apples, for god's sake. then i blow dry em with an industrial strength blow dryer, just to make sure everything is good and dead..

then i store 'em at 33F for several days. not a damn fruitfly any damn where in my condo. matter of fact, haven't seen a fruitfly in my damn kitchen or anywhere else for that matter in months.

i eat a delicious, well-washed apple, and drop the seeded rind into a closed garbage can, the kind that you step on to open. 1 day later, i open the garbage can, and 20 frickin fruit flies fly out. so there you have it, aristotle has been right all this time. who knew..

anyone know a permanent fix as a workaround to this whole fruitfly spontaneous generation fuckery..

tldr

There’s no such thing as one. Choose land or water? Mammal or reptile? The polar bear is perhaps a great apex predator. Take guns away from man. How many animal attacks can he survive? Not many. Wolverines are vicious. But they don’t kill apex predators. Water? Salt water croc. Land? Too difficult to say one. Polar bear lives in cold icy climate. Tigers live in jungles.