Eli5: Why do some spiders have poison that can kill mammals several hundred times it’s size , if they only eat other insects/arachnids, ect
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There are something like 50,000 spider species, practically all of which have venomous bites that they use to poison prey. Of these, something like 30 are known to have actually killed people, and in most of _those_ species, fatalities are an unusual outcome (after all, a bee sting can kill you too, if you happen to have a bad reaction).
So we are talking about maybe a dozen species out of 50,000 that can actually kill big mammals. That’s vanishingly rare. It’s the sort of pattern you’d expect to see if there’s no actual benefit to it, and it’s just a side effect of some venoms happening to be stronger than others, and some being on the very outlying end of that spectrum. Sometimes, you just roll all sixes.
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