the measurement doesn’t make sense to me, why is the deadliness of poison measured in how many of something it can kill? i understand the animal, such as an elephant, is important since bigger animals need larger quantities of or more deadly poisons, but what does it mean when its said poison can kill “a herd of elephants”? how do you know that one drop can kill a multitude of individuals?
In: Chemistry
This isn’t the way it’s expressed in any official context, it’s just an easy way to understand the magnitude. For example, you can say the average bite from a particular adult snake contains 10 mg of a toxin with an LD50 of 0.1mg for an adult human. But that’s wordy and hard to conceptualize. On the other hand if you say the bite of that snake could kill 2 elephant, it’s easy to understand that it’s extremely toxic.
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