Why are snake and spider venoms so powerful when their normal victims are so small?
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Part of it is that overkill is preferable to giving your prey any chance to struggle and potentially injure you.
Part of it is that some of these predators get into an evolutionary arms race with one type of prey that gradually develops a resistance to the venom. Over the generations, the slightly more resistant prey survive a little more, and the slightly more venomous predators eat a little better, and it keeps escalating as long as there’s a mechanism for it.
The most dangerous venomous and poisonous creatures use natural neurotoxins that attack the nervous system and brain. This requires very small amounts of material to be life-threatening, even for humans, because anything that can adversely affect your brain or nervous tissue might also shut down your lungs or heart. Naturally, most of these animals are at least somewhat immune to their own venom, so it doesn’t matter if there’s a small amount in their prey creatures.
In evolutionary terms, a powerful venom helps the species by developing avoidance behaviors in anything that might want to eat it.
Plenty of snakes and spiders are venomous while not being especially dangerous to humans, because their venom just isn’t powerful enough to affect a creature hundreds or thousands of times its size. For example, out of thousands of spider species in North America, only the black widow and brown recluse are dangerous enough to be truly life-threatening for people. Tarantulas are gigantic in spider terms, and their venom can kill rodents with a single bite, but biting humans will only cause something like a big wasp sting.
Well, you gotta remember.. with one bite they insta kill their prey and drink the liquefied innards. One bite to us mostly just pisses off our immune system.
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Why can cars go 140MPH but the speed limit is 70.
They want to accelerate fast.
Why is venom so potent.
Kill things fast.
The faster they kill, the earlier the dinner time.
Also, there’s two risk factor that makes them put extra.
-Risk of the prey running before venom kicks in
-risk of competing with scavengers while waiting for the meal to be ready.
In the snake world, their prey tends to be a lot faster than them in terms of running. Sure, snakes can strike fast but they are not necessarily the best sprinters or fast movers.
This presents an issue. A snake can either choose to bite, hold on and try to overpower it’s prey, like the various species of constrictors such as pythons and boas. This presents a risk to the snake as the prey can bite/scratch the snake or snap a fag, which can injure it. The reward is your prey cannot escape and you get to eat it without having to deal with your own venom too.
Snakes with potent venom bite their prey and then let go, because they know their venom will subdue their prey after it has escaped some distance away. They then use their scent organs to track down the prey and then eat it. The risk? The prey runs off too far and the snake loses scent, having spent valuable venom on it. The reward? Less likelihood of being injured by prey.
The true answer is that we don’t know why. There’s just several theories. Those include:
1. Speed to subdue
2. Evolutionary arms race
3. Evolutionary nuclear bomb (mutation by chance caused very powerful venom and nature has not caused it to be weaker)
4. Conservation of limited resources
I personally think #4 is a strong contender. A common trait of non-venomous snakes is that they are constrictors. Killing by constricting is extremely resource intensive in terms of energy expended. The snakes that developed venom probably did so because it was a more efficient use of limited energy resources (uses fewer calories to create, expends few calories to deploy, yields high calorie reward at low failure rate). So it makes sense to me that such powerful venom would just be a very effective way of conserving energy.
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