Even more ludicrously dangerous Australia

Post colonization the British of one of my timelines starts introducing animals into the Australian ecosystem, making it significantly more hostile to human life. What animals would you introduce into Australia to achieve the most deadly ecosystem possible?

I think that big cats (lions, tigers etc.) are a good start. It hard to beat bears as a candidate for a deadly creature.
 
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Post colonization the British of one of my timelines starts introducing animals into the Australian ecosystem, making it significantly more hostile to human life. What animals would you introduce into Australia to achieve the most deadly ecosystem possible?

I think that big cats (lions, tigers etc.) are a good start. It hard to beat bears as a candidate for a deadly creature.

None of those kill a lot of people a year. Remember that the most dangerous animal (outside of disease carrying insects, snails, etc.) is the hippopotamus, which conveniently can probably thrive in parts of Northern Australia (as drug lord Pablo Escobar's pet hippos, now turned feral, thrive in Colombia nowadays). I'd say that Panthera genus big cats (especially lions) can survive in Australia off of emu and kangaroo. The puma is also a potentially dangerous big cat which could thrive in much of Australia. You might want to add elephants, which are a nuisance in India and Africa although can be tamed to various effects. Elephants kill tons of people a year and trample lots of crops, although they can be controlled by killing them for their ivory. Sun bears are probably the only dangerous bear you might be able to introduce to Australia, but they're fairly small and compared to a grizzly bear or polar bear, aren't particularly dangerous (big cats sometimes kill them) although they sometimes do kill people. You might be able to introduce grizzlies to Tasmania, and those definitely are dangerous. Finally, the coyote is a great scavenger which can easily become a threat to humans especially if they interbreed with dingos.

Unless you have an eccentric obsessed with bringing in foreign megafauna to Australia, I doubt you'd logically get more introduced than elephants (see Borneo) and water buffalo, as well as Old World animals (cattle, horses, camels etc.) introduced. Bison (either European or American although the American bison is far easier to supply) would be a good choice too if you had to.

Overall, none of that makes Australia much more dangerous than it already is. And remember, these animals would thrive a lot less effectively in the temperate parts of Australia which incidentally are the best parts of Australia for European or Asian agriculture. Australia OTL has rabbits which have messed up the native wildlife, and things like the cane toad which similarly have done so. A lot of deaths in Africa and such which occur to these animals are only because of dense populations. Adding this to Australia won't result in many more deaths per year, especially since most wild animals prefer to be left alone and generally try and avoid humans. I've personally dealt with both feral dogs and coyotes, and they generally aren't hard to scare off or get away from--coyotes especially are fearful of humans in places where local governments encourage people to kill them which is the case in many rural areas (especially historically).
 
Would you be okay with having some of the extinct critters survive? It might make it ASB, but Australia has some very nasty extinct things, like the 7 meter long giant goanna (carnivorous), several large, probably carnivorous Dromornithidae, the marsupial lion, and of course, the carnivorous kangaroo
 

TruthfulPanda

Gone Fishin'
Would you be okay with having some of the extinct critters survive? It might make it ASB, but Australia has some very nasty extinct things, like the 7 meter long giant goanna (carnivorous), several large, probably carnivorous Dromornithidae, the marsupial lion, and of course, the carnivorous kangaroo
Butterfly the Aborigenes away and you have the megafauna ...
 
The deadliest solution is probably to have have ships from Indonesia and China in the 12-1300's accidentally introduce a wide selection of infectious, mosquito-born diseases. Then those diseases develop in mostly isolation for the next 500 years until widespread colonization begins. Settlers then discover that there's whole new variations of the traditional favorites like yellow fever or malaria.
 

TruthfulPanda

Gone Fishin'
The deadliest solution is probably to have have ships from Indonesia and China in the 12-1300's accidentally introduce a wide selection of infectious, mosquito-born diseases. Then those diseases develop in mostly isolation for the next 500 years until widespread colonization begins. Settlers then discover that there's whole new variations of the traditional favorites like yellow fever or malaria.
Or even better - mosquitos the size of bats!
 
Or even better - mosquitos the size of bats!

Doesn't matter how big they are, they aren't much more than a nuisance unless they can give you malaria or other diseases like yellow fever. And this isn't the Carboniferous period where the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere let invertebrates grow that big.
 
Well if you can minimize the damage humans did when they first arrived you could potential save Varanus priscus which is a good more dangerous than any living predator today.
 
Australia-The-Land-Of-Spiders-With-Hp-And-Mana-Bars.jpg
 

Teejay

Gone Fishin'
Post colonization the British of one of my timelines starts introducing animals into the Australian ecosystem, making it significantly more hostile to human life. What animals would you introduce into Australia to achieve the most deadly ecosystem possible?

I think that big cats (lions, tigers etc.) are a good start. It hard to beat bears as a candidate for a deadly creature.

The POD is that Homo Erectus somehow reaches Australia and the native megafauna have time to adapt to hominoid hunting. Then when the Europeans arrive they discover some truly terrifying animals :0

There was a species of Marsupial Lion called Thyalcoleo Carnifex which 101-130 kg in weight, with a bite comparable to an African Lion. Not to mention a giant monitor lizard at least as big as a Komodo dragon calle Megalania and a Anaconda sized snake called Wonambi.
 
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The POD is that Homo Erectus somehow reaches Australia and the native megafauna have time to adapt to hominoid hunting. Then when the Europeans arrive they discover some truly terrifying animals :0 There was a species of Marsupial Lion called Thyalcoleo Carnifex which 101-130 kg in weight, with a bite comparable to an African Lion. Not to mention a giant monitor lizard at least as big as a Komodo dragon calle Megalania and a Anaconda sized snake called Wonambi.

Or at least reindtroduce the Komodo Dragon back like suggested here in this wonderful article:


The Komodo Dragon: Even Deadlier Than You Thought
by theitinerantnaturalist

"The name "Komodo dragon" is a bit of misnomer. While this lizard found only in the Lesser Sundas today (specifically the islands of Komodo, Rinca, Padar, Gili Motang, and Flores), this limited distribution is artificial, a mere shadow of the glory that this empire of dragons used to hold. Komodo dragons evolved in Australia, and from there colonized Indonesia. And it was far from alone. From the same common ancestor arose an entire radiation of giant monitor lizards, and the Komodo dragon was merely the first of many to come. Later came the even larger Megalania (Varanus priscus), a titan weighing well over half a ton that ruled Australia, and the Timorean Dragon (Varanus sp.), a lizard larger than the Komodo dragon that reigned supreme on its namesake island. As the ice ages came and went, the Komodo dragon used the land bridges created by lower sea levels to island-hop its way all the way to Sundaland, the part of Indonesia that currently is partly flooded and contains Sumatra, Java and Bali. Here they came into contact with modern tigers, but it appears that the reptiles were competent enough to hold their own, as they coexisted as apex predators. But the good times did not last. Around 300,000 years ago, Sundaland became flooded, killing off the Timorean Dragon and the Asian population of the Komodo dragon. Megalania and other populations of Komodo dragons, however, adapted well to environmental changes.

lVoH9eN.jpg


Their demise would be caused not by natural events, but by our own species. The final blow came when humans arrived in Australia. By hunting the prey species eaten by giant lizards, and altering the ecosystems in general through use of fire, they managed to eat Megalania out of house and home, causing its extinction. This event also killed off every Australian land animal over 250 pounds in weight, and likely led to the Komodo dragon' demise there, leading to eastern Indonesia becoming the last remnant of the dragon dynasty. The Komodo dragons there got lucky: the island of Flores was home to a small hominid species (Homo floresiensis), so they had time to adapt to hominid incursions while the rest of their species were struck without warning. Personally I think it would be great to de-extinct megalania and reintroduce it and the Komodo dragon to Australia: Australian ecosystems need them still. You would expect, from their formerly widespread range, that Komodo dragons can live in an array of habitats. You'd be right. On their island homes they do well both in closed rain forests and open savannahs, as well as scrubby areas, thickets and rocky terrain."

Link to the full article.Very long fun and informative.
 
Love all the suggestions everyone :)

Could we get the colony of Australia to collapse in a prisoner rebellion? Perhaps by weakening Britain? How fast could a successor state recover to the level Australia was before the rebellion?

How does this relate to ludicrously dangerous Australia? The most dangerous creature is man. Imagine a post apocalyptic Australia overrun by insane prison gangs. Perhaps if the gangs are so inclined and the outside world is weakened enough we could see parts of Australia's coastline become pirate havens.

A bloodthirsty and terrifying people inhabiting a land overrun by disease and crazy deadly predators. It's a good fit.
 

Deleted member 97083

Or even better - mosquitos the size of bats!
Doesn't matter how big they are, they aren't much more than a nuisance unless they can give you malaria or other diseases like yellow fever. And this isn't the Carboniferous period where the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere let invertebrates grow that big.
If mosquitoes were the size of bats, they'd be conspicuous and an easy food source.
 
I'd happily trade hippos, rhinos and elephants for rabbits, and tigers and lions for foxes.

I have to say, the people who introduced rabbits and foxes for hunting were pussies! Surely they could have gotten hold of some big stuff.
 
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