I’m from northern Australia and we have many snakes that can easily kill humans, cattle and other live stock. The power of these snakes venom seems overkill for what is required?
In: 139
Evolution doesn’t know what’s going to happen in the future. It doesn’t know what the snake will evolve into, what its prey will be, or what will be needed to kill it. Venom simply evolves and if it’s not potent enough, then it provides no evolutionary benefit and there is no selective pressure, whereas any amount beyond what is needed is a success.
Snakes with potent venom are often those adapted such that either their meals are few and far between, their meals are potentially dangerous to them, or both.
When potential meals are rare it is necessary that every attempt made at catching prey have a good chance to succeed, and potent venom makes that much more likely. A venom might be excessively lethal overall in order to obtain the desired rapidity of action; that prey needs to stop struggling very quickly because if it breaks free and dashes off just to die later the snake is still out of a meal.
A snake that eats rodents is exposed to the danger of its teeth, and rodent teeth are no joke. Snakes really can’t stand being chewed on by their pray for a while so they really need it dead quickly. Reducing chances of injury and increasing success rate in hunting both aid the snake, while incidentally giving them a venom which is a powerful deterrent to predators of themselves.
[removed]
For a lot of vipers like rattlesnakes, their strategy to not get attacked by prey is to let it go after the bite and track it down to eat it once it’s dead or too weak to fight. Having weaker venom might still kill the prey but it might only do it after it has run too far away to track down, so the vipers with the strongest venom would have an easier time getting food even if they could all kill things.
It needs to kill it’s prey as quickly as possible.
If a mouse or rat takes a few minutes to die it can do a lot of damage to the snake before it dies.
So it has to be super potent so the prey dies quickly enough to not retaliate.
Evolution doesn’t work like “we evolve the minimum nescessary” it works like this: “the most efficient at survival produces most offspring, spreading his genes” as long as there is no downside to stronger venom its more efficient and therefore has a higher chance to become a dominant feature in a species.
And there is no downside. Producing a more potent venom does not cost a snake significantly more energy or something while killing prey faster conserves energy.
Others have already mentioned that killing an animal quickly reduces the chance that it will get away/hurt you back.
One other important reason snake venom has gotten so deadly is that a lot of their common prey have also evolved resistance to their venom. Which sets off an arms race where snake venom gets more deadly to combat the resistance, so the venom gets deadlier, and so on.
G’day fellow upside down redditor, to answer your question, the “easily kill human” venom can in fact easily kill a human, but it takes time to kill said human, whereas when a snake is hunting a marsupial like like a rat or a quenda (Aussie small marsupial for all you seppos), it cant afford to bite the snake and inject its venom, only for the lil bastard to bolt away and die a few minutes late where the snake can’t find it. It need to incapacitate its prey in seconds if it wants to eat its dinner. So the lethal dose for a human is a INSTANT FATALITY dose for its lil prey
It leaves no room for error. If the prey is bitten, the prey is dying. No ifs, no buts. Personally, I’m in favour of the ‘overkill method’. Going all-out to overwhelm your objective, beyond what is necessary, is a good tactic.
Latest Answers