eli5: Why do some tiny animals contain enough venom to kill thousands of humans, isn’t that just overkill?
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There are some great answers already, but I’ll add one more – evolution is a process by which a mutation leads to any successful breeding, it stays.
Having a mutation that caused the venom to be more useful than was necessary never reduced the creature’s ability to breed, so it didn’t get weaker.
Also, humans simply didn’t evolve the resistance to the kinds of venom that were not used against our ancestors. The two lack of pressures combined makes us especially vulnerable to a venom that happened to be more powerful than it’s necessary to accomplish the task.
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