This DIY Halloween Costume Turns You Into the World's Scariest Animal

Want to wear the scariest Halloween costume possible this year? Skip the vampire fangs and werewolf claws. With just a few simple supplies from a drugstore — like pipe cleaners, fairy wings, and a red sweatshirt — you can dress up as the most dangerous animal on the planet: the mosquito. Scientists and health experts agree that this tiny insect kills more people each year than sharks, snakes, or any other animal most people fear.

Most people think of sharks as deadly hunters. Sharks do kill people, but the numbers might surprise you. In 2025, shark attacks caused 12 deaths around the world, according to the International Shark Attack File. There were also 65 unprovoked bites and 25 provoked bites recorded that same year. That sounds scary, but it is a very small number compared to other animals.

Snakes are far deadlier than sharks. The World Health Organization estimates that 5.4 million people are bitten by snakes every year. Between 81,000 and 138,000 of those bites result in death annually. That is a much bigger number — but mosquitoes still beat snakes by a huge margin.

Mosquitoes are dangerous because they can carry and spread serious diseases. These include dengue fever, Zika, and malaria. A female mosquito of the Anopheles group can bite an infected person or animal and pick up the malaria parasite. The parasite travels through the mosquito's body and into its saliva. When the mosquito bites someone new, it passes along the parasite through its spit — and that can be deadly.

The numbers around malaria are shocking. UNICEF reported that in 2024, there were about 282 million malaria cases around the world. About 610,000 people died from the disease that year. Most heartbreaking of all, around 74 percent of those deaths were children under the age of five.

Grayson Brown, executive director of the Puerto Rico Vector Control Unit, put the mosquito's danger into clear terms. "Mosquitoes are responsible for killing 2,000 people a day," he said. "More people die in an hour than all the shark attacks in a whole year. What other animal inflicts that kind of damage?" Those words help explain why experts call the mosquito the most dangerous animal on Earth.

There are also new worries about mosquitoes spreading into areas where they were not found before. In the past few years, a small number of people in the United States caught malaria without traveling outside the country. This is rare, because a big campaign in the 1940s and 1950s wiped out most malaria-carrying mosquitoes in the U.S. Scientists are not sure exactly how these new cases happened. Some think warming temperatures from climate change may be allowing dangerous mosquitoes to survive in places that used to be too cold for them.

Even actor Ryan Gosling agrees that the mosquito is scary. When he appeared on The Late Show on CBS, host Stephen Colbert asked him: "What is the scariest animal?" Gosling first said "man," but then changed his answer to the mosquito. Scientists and health experts would say he made the right call.

If you want to make a mosquito costume, it takes less than an hour. Use large sunglasses for big bug eyes, and attach two pipe cleaners to a headband for antennae. Buy fairy wings and spray-paint them black, then roll up a large piece of black paper into a cone shape for the mosquito's beak. Finish the look with an oversized red sweatshirt decorated with black electrical tape to look like skin patterns — red for all the blood this mosquito has been drinking. Good luck out there, and watch out for flyswatters!