[MUSIC] Alex I'll take "Potent Potables" for $200 please.

I may move slow, but my venom can kill you in minutes.

Joe What is a cone snail!

That is correct.

I'll take "Potent Potables" for $400 please Alex.

Whether its Mortal Kombat or my venomous tail, play against me and you could see a “fatality ”.

Joe again.

What is a scorpion!

"PotYeens.t Potables" for $600 Alex.

[OPEN] Only a few of natures toxic avengers earn the title of “venomous.

” If a toxin has to be ingested, inhaled, or absorbed, we call that animal poisonous, like these Bufrogt s.ve nomous animals deliver it direct, usually into a wound.

Biting, stinging, stabbing, that sort of thing.

We find venom all over the animal kingdom, and theres as many different venoms as there are venomous species.

Animals with spines and stingers often use venom for defense.

Animals with toxic mouthparts or tentacles tend to use their venom to hunt.

Others use venom to eat or even to fight during mating season just when you thought the platypus couldnt get any weirder.

So whats the most venomous animal?

ScientItissts t uousughal tlyo rsaany.k venoms using a number called the “LD50 ”, the dose it takes to turn half of test animals from alive to no longer alive.

The lower the LD50 the deadlier the venom.

But most venoms didnt evolve to target lab mice, so that number doesnt always Whteenll w te head wd hoinle f sactotoryrs.

l ike how often people are bitten or stung and how many actual deaths that animal causes the winner for “deadliest ” is clear.

Whyd it have to be snakes?

Venomous snakes make some of natures most deadly and complex chemical cocktails.

They manufacture that venom using modified saliva glands, and deliver it using hypodermic th .

On paper, a soft, ectothermic noodle isnt the ideal predator, but with venom in their arsenal, snakes dont have to outrun or fight their prey.

They just paralyze it with neurotoxins, or let it bleed to death from the inside by injecting hemotoxins.

Who needs legs when youve got chemistry?

When toxinologist Bryan Fry mapped snake venom genes onto an evolutionary tree, he found that snakes branched off from lizards about 100 million years ago, but their venom was Ve nom isev seno obildolerog.ic ally expensive that many modern snakes have stopped making it, but the ancestor of all snakes was venomous.

The earliest venom proteins were borrowed from other parts of the body, where they did normal jobs, like control blood pressure or how nerves work.

If they were present in saliva, and happened to kill prey faster, that species gained an advantage.

olated them in the mouth so snakes wouldnt poison themselves, and they developed sophisticated delivery methods.

Venom genes across the animal kingdom are some of the fastest-evolving genes we know of.

la to stay one bite ahead of their prey developing resistance.

Even though a cobra can take down an elephant, to a honey badger, it looks like dinner, and several other snake-eating animals have figured out venom immunity.

Like honey badgers, mongooses and hedgehogs have tiny mutations in the switches that control muscle contraction, so venoms that cause paralysis dont work on them.

And the opossum is so awesome that one ingredient from its blood can neutralize a wide variety en om s. Scientists are studying it as a possible universal anti-venom.

Today, antivenoms are made by injecting nonlethal doses of venom into a large animal.

Its immune system goes to work dispatching antibodies to inactivate the venom, the antibodies are purified from the blood, and we have an anti-venom cocktail ready for some unlucky human.

e can train our own immune systems to fight venom.

Self-immunizers regularly inject small amounts of venom into their own body, hopefully not enough to kill them, but enough to get their antibody factories going.

I shouldnt have to say this, but DO NOT try this at home.

SI-ing sounds like a ticket to the Darwin Awards if you ask me, but still, those who do it claim they can take lethal doses of venom and walk away.

Of all venomous animals, we seem to have a special interest in snakes.

Brain scans have shown that we can detect snakes before we consciously see them, theres even special neurons in primate brains that only respond to images of snakes.

The evolutionary pressure of not becoming dinner for a hungry snake favored primates on .

More complex vision required larger, more complex brains, and larger more complex brains are what set our ancestors down the path of becoming us.

Anthropologist Lynne Isbell calls this the “Snake Detection Theory ” of primate evolution.

Its certainly only part of the story of our big brains, but to come down from the trees and bite into a world of knowledge, maybe we just needed a little help from a snake.

Stay curious.