Bats are a staple of vampire lore, but not many of them actually walk the walk: Of the roughly 1,000 known bat species, only three drink blood. Two of those the hairy-legged vampire bat and the white-winged vampire bat mainly prey on birds, while the common vampire bat is a bit more versatile.
The Amazon and Orinoco rivers are the only known habitats for this tiny, parasitic catfish, which attacks other fish by swimming into their gills - and is rumored to be able to attack a person by swimming into his or her urethra.
While they've been behind more human deaths than any other animal, mosquitoes themselves are actually pretty harmless. Males eat a vegan, nectar-based diet, and although egg- laying females drink blood to get protein, even they don't cause much trouble besides red, itchy welts.
Ticks are some of the most prolific vampires on Earth, capable of drinking up to 600 times their body weight in blood thanks to a stretchable outer shell. They prefer warm, wooded areas near water, and while they rely on a range of tactics to find food some wait in tall grass, while others hunt for hosts they all use similarly vicious teeth, claws, and feeding tubes to dig in once they find it.
Their name may not sound very scary, but "kissing bugs" can be even worse than bedbugs. They're bigger and more aggressive and, more importantly, often bite people's faces to drink their blood. They attack while you're asleep, but unlike bedbugs, they can also spread disease namely the parasite that causes Chagas disease.
Leeches are related to earthworms, but most are a bit more vicious than their dirt-dwelling cousins. Some are ambush predators, lying in wait for victims like slugs and snails, while others are blood-sucking parasites.
Like fleas, lice are parasitic bugs that live on their hosts, but they're even more specialized lice target not only certain animals, but certain parts of certain animals. Take the three species that bite people, for example: head lice, body lice, and pubic lice.