It is known to deliver up to eight venomous bites in a single attack, often snapping its jaws fiercely several times to inflict multiple punctures in the same attack.
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Unlike other venomous snakes that strike with a single, accurate bite then retreat while waiting for the prey to die, the fierce snake subdues the prey with a series of rapid, accurate strikes. There does seem to be one good reason for its intensely toxic venom, by comparison with most snakes.
“They just hit the absolute jackpot and it makes perfect evolutionary sense that it would occur. “People have always wondered why Australian snakes are so toxic and now we know the biological reason,” Fry said. Toxicity was also influenced by adapting to new forms of prey, which in turn were potentially dangerous to snakes, such as large rats. This isolation led to rapid expansion and radical innovations in the development of their venom. “Fry said when snakes arrived in Australia they had the entire continent open to them with no competition. “This combination is extremely potent and this is what gives the Australian brown snakes and taipans their extreme lethality, more so than any other snake in the world,” he said. The common ancestor of taipans and brown snakes also used a component known as factor V, which is needed for factor Xa to become completely active. He said Australian snakes recruited a potent blood enzyme called factor Xa into their venom after colonising the continent about 15 to 20 million years ago. Just found this article on evolution of Australian snake venom dated from 15 July 2004ĭr Bryan Fry of the Australian Venom Research Unit at the University of Melbourne told a genetics conference this week that DNA analysis showed venom originated from one ancestral type. In the meantime, here’s a video on the critter and the overly macho man who provokes it (if you want to see Steve Irwin doing the same thing, go here): I’ll leave that for you to ponder as well. Of course that raises the question of why it’s wasting venom if its prey are smaller than humans (which they are), and it could kill even a kangaroo dozens of times over with a single bite. It is estimated that one bite possesses enough lethality to kill at least 100 fully grown men, and, depending on the nature of the bite, it has the potential to kill someone in as little as 30 to 45 minutes if left untreated. It is an extremely fast and agile snake that can strike instantly with extreme accuracy, often striking multiple times in the same attack, and it envenoms in almost every case. Unlike most snakes, the inland taipan is a specialist mammalhunter so its venom is specially adapted to kill warm-blooded species. How venomous is it? Ask Wikipedia (my emphasis):īased on the median lethal dose value in mice, its venom, drop for drop, is by far the most toxic of any snake – much more so than even sea snakes – and it has the most toxic venom of any reptile when tested on human heartcell culture. Now why are there so many venomous snakes in Australia? (I think the same holds for venomous spiders.) I can think of two or three reasons, and I’m sure it’s been discussed in the literature, but it’s Saturday and I’ll leave this for readers to think about or look up.īut I do want to mention the #1 most venomous snake: the Inland taipan. Note that the top 11 are all from Australia, as are 21 of the top 25. Please label your submissions with user flair after submitting them.Here, from Facebook, is a list of the world’s most venomous snakes, as measured by the LD50 (the amount of venom it take to kill 50% of a given prey type, expressed as milligrams of venom per kilogram of prey). If you want something off-list, you can change the flair text yourself. If you don't have a favorite genre of biology, consider "general biology" or "bio enthusiast". Pick flair representing your favorite biological field of interest.
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