why do some small spiders have powerful enough venom to kill 4 elephants when they mostly eat small insects?
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If you tag a prey animal and it survives long enough to get away you’ve wasted your time.
If it survives long enough to fight, you may have wasted your life.
To mitigate that risk, a lot of venomous ambush predators like snakes and spiders have developed massive overkill dosage – they pump enough venom into their target to make sure it’s ultradead ultrafast. No fuss, no fight.
Spiders have venom of varying potency. However, what matters to a particular spider species is that its venom’s potency allows it to capture sufficient prey so that it lives long enough to reproduce. If the potency of a spider’s venom exceeds this threshold, even by a substantial margin, it will not affect the spider’s ability to reproduce unless the potency is so excessive that it kills off its entire food supply.
No. We just had the exact question about snakes yesterday. Like, exactly the same. Refer to that
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