12 Most Dangerous Animals in the Great Lakes You Never Knew Were There

You will walk into the Great Lakes this summer without once looking down, because it is not the ocean. But the most dangerous animal in this water has no teeth, no venom, and you have almost certainly carried it home on your own body without ever feeling it. If this is the kind of thing that makes you look twice at water you thought you knew, subscribe. It takes two seconds and it genuinely helps the channel. This is a countdown of twelve dangerous animals of the Great Lakes, from the water you already fear a little to the land at the edge of your own yard, ranked not by how deadly they are on paper but by how completely they have stayed out of the picture you carry of this place. The only venomous snake native to the region. A parasite that came in from the Atlantic and never left. A giant most people were taught to find gentle. And the one, at number one, that rode home on your skin. Which lake are you watching from right now? Drop it in the comments. Freshwater coast or landlocked, it is good to see how far this reaches. Sources: U.S. Great Lakes Fishery Commission and NOAA (sea lamprey); CDC (tick-borne disease, insect-sting fatalities); Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota state wildlife agencies and the National Park Service (bear, wolf, moose, massasauga); Wilderness & Environmental Medicine (massasauga bite records); City of Toledo and NOAA (2014 western Lake Erie microcystin event); peer-reviewed deer-vehicle collision mortality data.