Blurry rats and coyotes with mange: the oddly thrilling subreddit dedicated to identifying wildlife

The most popular posts on r/animalid are exotic lizards and rare birds – but it’s the haziest trail cam screenshots that feel the most dangerous, the most spectacular

• Read more in the Internet wormhole series

I spent the first decade of my life in Vancouver Island, Canada, in an area rich with parks, lakes and forests. Deer would occasionally wander into our neighbourhood and nibble on the blossoms in our front yard. In that neck of the (literal) woods, mountains and deer also mean cougars.

My sister and I would play at a local park, then walk home along a track parallel to a dense forest. My older sister, being three and a half years ahead of me in life and therefore lightyears ahead of me in wisdom, would helpfully declare that if we encountered a cougar it would attack me, not her, as I’m the smaller prey.