eli5: What does it mean when people say that an animal has enough venom to kill X amount of people?

Question

I’ve always been curious to what exactly this means. I may be overthinking it but like what does this refer to? Does this mean that they have can inject venom up to X amount of people before they die or run out?

In: 3

Answer 1

There’s a few things to clarify here.

First off there is the concept of “LD50,” (Lethal Dose 50%) which is the dose of something that statistically has a 50% chance of killing any randomly selected person.

Each animal will only store a limited amount of poison/venom in their body at any given time, though they will replace this as it’s consumed.

So, if you take the amount of poison or venom present in a single animal, divide that by the LD50, and then divide that by two (since half will survive the LD50), you end up with an estimate of how many people could hypothetically be killed by thr quantity of poison/venom in the animal.