eli5: Why do some tiny animals contain enough venom to kill thousands of humans, isn’t that just overkill?
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When we look at really small animals that have crazy strong poisons used for defense, such as cone snails or poison dart frogs, the animal itself is very vulnerable outside of it’s poison. Stronger toxins like that do more than just kill larger creatures, they also kill them faster. If a fish tries to eat a cone snail, even if the poison kills the fish in a few minutes the snail is still dead, so it has to kill the predator almost instantly to make a huge difference, and as such leads to crazy overkills.
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