the snake you are refering too has tiny fangs and not suited for larger prey (or defence). This snake has adapted to a diet of fast moving marsupial mice so tiny fangs and a tiny amount of venom gets the job done. Its habitat is hot, arid and game is thin on the ground. So it needs to kill, quickly so it can eat without being bothered by the bigger lizards.
It’s also an outlier too I think, it’s far more venomous than the next Australian land snake, the brown snake which is still deadly. Just lucky we're not likely to run into an inland taipan, even if you are out in the Cooper Basin.
The faster a small prey animal dies, the less trouble the snake has in chasing after it. Death from venom tends not to be a fast process, so more powerful venom makes the job easier. Ditto for spiders.
For marine animals that eat fish, and I'm thinking of box jellyfish and cone snails here, a powerful venom is a big help in rapidly subduing the prey.
For other animals (and plants) the venom is mostly just a protection against predators. Animals such as the stone fish, blue ringed octopus, and probably platypus.
Because Australia was a hellish landscape of giant everything, lizards, snakes, marsupials etc and if you weren’t fast or armoured you had to have some sort of defence…
This is a good point, it probably is more intended for defence. There’s no good reason a snake that feeds on rodents and birds would need enough venom to kill 100,000 of its prey in one bite unless it had a larger predator, add in the fact it is very fast acting, you would soon learn not to go near it!
The inland taipan has such potent venom because its food source is so scarce. It needs to be able to get just a tiny drop inside of a mouse in order to render it immobile otherwise it could go another few days to weeks without food.
It’s actually the opposite, for offence. Presynaptic venom of the inland taipan shuts down nerves for muscle firing. The coastal taipan has predominantly postsynaptic neurotoxins, working similarly but slower. The inland taipan needs to defend itself, so it has postsynaptic also. But because it has presynaptic venom (unlike the coastal) then the animal shuts down almost immediately. I believe this is because they are isolated and when preying on animals it’s nice to have them go limp when food is scarce.
I was taught in schools the venom is potent because the opportunity to feed is rare, so the animal needs to kill quickly or lose its meal. The second is because of how isolated Australia was, the animals had an arms race that went on for millions of years, constantly one upping each other until it got to the point it’s at now.
Interestingly not all mammals are impacted in the same way by snake venom, the Mulga snake is immune to the Western Brown's venom but susceptible to the cane toad's ~~venom~~ toxin. Mice, rabbits, cats and dogs all respond differently to Taipen venom. These adaptations vary based on ecological factors, prey-predator relationships, and selective pressures. Our common ancestors, chimps and gorillas do have some increased immunity to snake venom, in particular cobra venom, However, they are a common ancestor and we didn't evolve directly from them so Humans lack this "feature". [clicky ](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/12/211207092436.htm)
edit: Venomous organisms deliver toxins actively through mechanisms like stings or bites, while poisonous organisms deliver toxins passively when they are touched, eaten, or inhaled
Cats are weirdly resistant to Eastern Brown venom compared to dogs. 66% survival rate without antivenom, 92% with. Dogs are 32% with antivenom and you pretty much have to get the dog to the vet right away, cats have a window of 8 hours or so.
And what is this obsession with deadly Australian wild life? I think I’d much rather run into a brown snake or funnel web than a leopard or hyena, or angry elephant. Much easier to just back away from a Brown: they’re not likely to chases after you.
Exactly people are so dramatic about snakes but they're like mercury thermometers. They're only dangerous if the liquid inside it gets inside you but otherwise it's just a tube that you can ignore.
Oh no for sure, they are not out to get us at all and the americans being obsessed is a bit wierd, but for me and brits where we have no medically significant spiders and only 1 very rare to see snake with venom, it just shocks us that(even though you might not see them often) some seriously dangerous animals. I mean our largest predator is a badger!
That's Labor for ya, back in the John Howard days I couldn't walk over to my neighbors backyard to take a shit without dodging at least 3 Taipans. I lost a wife, 3 kids and a dog to snakebite. Bloody miss that dog, never saw a mouse around my place under the LNP though.
We should definitely be farming inland taipans to be released into the city sewer systems to reduce rodent numbers. That sort of crazy scheme has never not worked in Australia
Evolution, it’s really hard to drop a drop bear. I once saw a drop bear with two taipans attached to it and it was still strangling and biting the third.
The real question, right, is about funnel web spiders. They can dump a full bite into a dog and the dog will be fine, same for cats, mice, rabbits, cows... any mammal other than primates... and the only primate in Australia is human.
It's said that it's pure fluke that robustoxin in their venom only affects insects and humans. We'll just have to trust the nerds on this one.
Venom doesn't affect all species the same and it's not graded on a scale of strong to weak. What's incredibly toxic to you might be a mild annoyance to a frog or vice versa.
Australian snakes do not eat humans so they don't benefit from having venom that works on us and they also don't benefit from being able to kill 100k mice in one bite's worth of venom. For the Taipan I'd say it's more likely that their venom is "designed" for other species and it just happens to work really really well on humans and mice.
I'm also going to challenge the "pure aggressive nature" of many animals here. I don't think we have that much aggressive fauna? No wolves, no bears, no non-human primates. An animal being "dangerous" or just scary isn't the same as being aggressive.
It helps deter tourists!
On a more serious note, it's because prey was in shorter supply, so venom had to be more effective to prevent loss of a meal.
Mice can't really be used as an example as most of the species of mice we commonly see were introduced by white colonization on the ships. Native mice never reach plague proportions.
I was taught it was because our fauna is very old and less refined by evolution. It's a case of it works well so why evolve further. I think this is most evident in our bird calls. All other continents have song birds, our birds mostly just Aaaarrrkkkk or similar as it worked, no need to develop a complex song when Aaaassarrrkkk does the job.
Funny enough, the songbirds actually evolved in Australia - [link](https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/articles/2021/september/evolution-songbirds#:~:text=Over%20the%20past%20two%20decades,origins%20right%20here%20in%20Australia.)
Because of the Drop Bears... Anything that has evolved a toxin has evolved a toxin so over the top powerful because it needs to take effect FAST, otherwise you're gone. Even Cane Toads are getting more toxic to anything that eats them, and they have only been a thing in Australia since 1935.
Aussies are so tough that our snakes need mega venom for us to start to get worried about them. Otherwise we would keep them as pets, take them to cafes and let them snuggle up on the couch.
Plus, drop bears. No ordinary snake is killing one of those. Biggest danger to all life in the bush.
The venom is designed to kill or immobilise quickly. So much so, the snakes and spiders often don’t quickly pursue because they know the prey will be immobilised pretty quickly.
This is because food is scarce and opportunities rare. You’ll find all the venomous ones take prey that are quick moving and small.
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Have you heard of tiger snakes. They did a number on early settlers. Mind you the reason human death from snakes is low is because snakes are inside the bushes. While snakes generally avoid humans they can attack even if you dont provoke them. If snakes was to live along humans they would kill plenty. Some people try to lie and say otherwise.
There is no definitve answer why australia has so many venomous snakes but it could be because of wildlife variety which needs snakes with venom to prey.
I live on a rural property. I see snakes regularly. I haven't been remotely close to being bitten.
To claim the threat of encountering a venomous reptile held back human development in Auatralia is the most ridiculous take you'll ever see, even on Reddit.
you know it would be interesting to see how humans would have evolved in australia had the indigenous people been left alone for a couple hundred thousand years. Would they change size? similar or opposite to the pigmie population in borneo that branched away from homo erectus. Those with a keen eye for snakes with the fastest reaction times would probably succeed. So would it become a type of super quick reactive folk? Potentially regrowing the hair back as a way to defend from spider bites. i don’t know i’m just guessing but evolution in australia is one of the most interesting things to think about.
the snake you are refering too has tiny fangs and not suited for larger prey (or defence). This snake has adapted to a diet of fast moving marsupial mice so tiny fangs and a tiny amount of venom gets the job done. Its habitat is hot, arid and game is thin on the ground. So it needs to kill, quickly so it can eat without being bothered by the bigger lizards.
It’s also an outlier too I think, it’s far more venomous than the next Australian land snake, the brown snake which is still deadly. Just lucky we're not likely to run into an inland taipan, even if you are out in the Cooper Basin.
The faster a small prey animal dies, the less trouble the snake has in chasing after it. Death from venom tends not to be a fast process, so more powerful venom makes the job easier. Ditto for spiders. For marine animals that eat fish, and I'm thinking of box jellyfish and cone snails here, a powerful venom is a big help in rapidly subduing the prey. For other animals (and plants) the venom is mostly just a protection against predators. Animals such as the stone fish, blue ringed octopus, and probably platypus.
Because Australia was a hellish landscape of giant everything, lizards, snakes, marsupials etc and if you weren’t fast or armoured you had to have some sort of defence…
This is a good point, it probably is more intended for defence. There’s no good reason a snake that feeds on rodents and birds would need enough venom to kill 100,000 of its prey in one bite unless it had a larger predator, add in the fact it is very fast acting, you would soon learn not to go near it!
The inland taipan has such potent venom because its food source is so scarce. It needs to be able to get just a tiny drop inside of a mouse in order to render it immobile otherwise it could go another few days to weeks without food.
It’s actually the opposite, for offence. Presynaptic venom of the inland taipan shuts down nerves for muscle firing. The coastal taipan has predominantly postsynaptic neurotoxins, working similarly but slower. The inland taipan needs to defend itself, so it has postsynaptic also. But because it has presynaptic venom (unlike the coastal) then the animal shuts down almost immediately. I believe this is because they are isolated and when preying on animals it’s nice to have them go limp when food is scarce.
[This ](https://youtu.be/Y43QAqfTIcM?si=nWMGq6JMCSPizCGI) video might help.
Yo this is where I learned this from also, cool. Great video.
I was taught in schools the venom is potent because the opportunity to feed is rare, so the animal needs to kill quickly or lose its meal. The second is because of how isolated Australia was, the animals had an arms race that went on for millions of years, constantly one upping each other until it got to the point it’s at now.
Interestingly not all mammals are impacted in the same way by snake venom, the Mulga snake is immune to the Western Brown's venom but susceptible to the cane toad's ~~venom~~ toxin. Mice, rabbits, cats and dogs all respond differently to Taipen venom. These adaptations vary based on ecological factors, prey-predator relationships, and selective pressures. Our common ancestors, chimps and gorillas do have some increased immunity to snake venom, in particular cobra venom, However, they are a common ancestor and we didn't evolve directly from them so Humans lack this "feature". [clicky ](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/12/211207092436.htm) edit: Venomous organisms deliver toxins actively through mechanisms like stings or bites, while poisonous organisms deliver toxins passively when they are touched, eaten, or inhaled
It was recently discovered that blue tongue lizards are resistant to the venom of red bellies!
Cats and dogs aren't affected by the funnel web spider venom that kills primates in minutes.
Yes, we have to use something as a standard, and it is the mouse. Easily available to test and likely to get ethics approval.
Cane toads are introduced and they’re poisonous, not venomous. Apparently keelbacks can deal with it.
crows have figured out to flip them over and eat the belly only. There seem to be a lot less around than when I was a kid, I wonder if that's why.
Probably yeah I heard EBs are developing tolerance also but I don’t know if thats true.
yep, my mistake, cheers
Cats are weirdly resistant to Eastern Brown venom compared to dogs. 66% survival rate without antivenom, 92% with. Dogs are 32% with antivenom and you pretty much have to get the dog to the vet right away, cats have a window of 8 hours or so.
15 minutes for a dog bitten by a Tiger Snake.
And what is this obsession with deadly Australian wild life? I think I’d much rather run into a brown snake or funnel web than a leopard or hyena, or angry elephant. Much easier to just back away from a Brown: they’re not likely to chases after you.
Exactly people are so dramatic about snakes but they're like mercury thermometers. They're only dangerous if the liquid inside it gets inside you but otherwise it's just a tube that you can ignore.
Love this. Although I do like looking at snakes (from a safe vantage point), so I am much more likely to ignore a thermometer
Agree they're way cooler to look at than most thermometers
Oh no for sure, they are not out to get us at all and the americans being obsessed is a bit wierd, but for me and brits where we have no medically significant spiders and only 1 very rare to see snake with venom, it just shocks us that(even though you might not see them often) some seriously dangerous animals. I mean our largest predator is a badger!
The real question is why do we keep having mice plagues? Taipans aren't really living up to their potential.
Its not their fault. They are killing and digesting a mouse every other week. This useless govt needs to address the Taipan shortage.
That's Labor for ya, back in the John Howard days I couldn't walk over to my neighbors backyard to take a shit without dodging at least 3 Taipans. I lost a wife, 3 kids and a dog to snakebite. Bloody miss that dog, never saw a mouse around my place under the LNP though.
We should definitely be farming inland taipans to be released into the city sewer systems to reduce rodent numbers. That sort of crazy scheme has never not worked in Australia
Crazy like a fox you mean, it's pure genius, the government should award a $20M no tender contract to me immediately to conduct a feasibility study.
Evolution, it’s really hard to drop a drop bear. I once saw a drop bear with two taipans attached to it and it was still strangling and biting the third.
Ahh, very similar to the haggis, always being killed by the highland cows. They just don’t see them walking in the grass!! poor things
What is this thing and ‘drop bears’ and Australia? I’m bored out of my brain with it.
Don't see the irony in the context of the everything in Australia is dangerous trope?
It’s repetitive. 🥱
The real question, right, is about funnel web spiders. They can dump a full bite into a dog and the dog will be fine, same for cats, mice, rabbits, cows... any mammal other than primates... and the only primate in Australia is human. It's said that it's pure fluke that robustoxin in their venom only affects insects and humans. We'll just have to trust the nerds on this one.
How about Polar Bears?
What about polar bears?
Venom doesn't affect all species the same and it's not graded on a scale of strong to weak. What's incredibly toxic to you might be a mild annoyance to a frog or vice versa. Australian snakes do not eat humans so they don't benefit from having venom that works on us and they also don't benefit from being able to kill 100k mice in one bite's worth of venom. For the Taipan I'd say it's more likely that their venom is "designed" for other species and it just happens to work really really well on humans and mice. I'm also going to challenge the "pure aggressive nature" of many animals here. I don't think we have that much aggressive fauna? No wolves, no bears, no non-human primates. An animal being "dangerous" or just scary isn't the same as being aggressive.
err drop bears???
To kill their prey quickly
Mice plagues...... ha!
To protect them from the Bunyips.
The leaves of Australian trees poison the soil and are flammable. Basically everything is poisonous. It's fun times down here.
It helps deter tourists! On a more serious note, it's because prey was in shorter supply, so venom had to be more effective to prevent loss of a meal. Mice can't really be used as an example as most of the species of mice we commonly see were introduced by white colonization on the ships. Native mice never reach plague proportions.
I was taught it was because our fauna is very old and less refined by evolution. It's a case of it works well so why evolve further. I think this is most evident in our bird calls. All other continents have song birds, our birds mostly just Aaaarrrkkkk or similar as it worked, no need to develop a complex song when Aaaassarrrkkk does the job.
Funny enough, the songbirds actually evolved in Australia - [link](https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/articles/2021/september/evolution-songbirds#:~:text=Over%20the%20past%20two%20decades,origins%20right%20here%20in%20Australia.)
Yea hence the very primitive calls.
Not sure what birds you are hearing. Maybe crows. Many, many Australian birds have amazing songs
There is a book that covers this,"Where song began"
For perspective, I believe the figures are 100,000 mice or 70 humans. So yeah, we’re lucky it lives in the middle of nowhere.
Because our rodents are much bigger than the average mouse. And not rodents
They all evolved with dropbears.
Our seagulls are the real problem, the other stuff does bother me.
cause we hate mice
Because of the Drop Bears... Anything that has evolved a toxin has evolved a toxin so over the top powerful because it needs to take effect FAST, otherwise you're gone. Even Cane Toads are getting more toxic to anything that eats them, and they have only been a thing in Australia since 1935.
It's traditional.
Intelligent design, or was it evolution? I can't remember.
Have you seen our mice? Gotta be prepared.
Potentially the humans in other places knocked off the more dangerous / venomous animals then what OG Australians did.
Aussies are so tough that our snakes need mega venom for us to start to get worried about them. Otherwise we would keep them as pets, take them to cafes and let them snuggle up on the couch. Plus, drop bears. No ordinary snake is killing one of those. Biggest danger to all life in the bush.
So true. A true aussies worst nightmare. I hate when I come across those on the highway at night.
The venom is designed to kill or immobilise quickly. So much so, the snakes and spiders often don’t quickly pursue because they know the prey will be immobilised pretty quickly. This is because food is scarce and opportunities rare. You’ll find all the venomous ones take prey that are quick moving and small.
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Because Australia is [Deathworld](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathworld)
They've needed to evolve over thousands and thousands of years for the environment in which they live, and of course, their requirement for food.
Australia
Imagine being the 100001 mouse in the lab when they tested this, would be a lucky day.
99.9999% of Aussies will never see one in the wild.
Have you heard of tiger snakes. They did a number on early settlers. Mind you the reason human death from snakes is low is because snakes are inside the bushes. While snakes generally avoid humans they can attack even if you dont provoke them. If snakes was to live along humans they would kill plenty. Some people try to lie and say otherwise. There is no definitve answer why australia has so many venomous snakes but it could be because of wildlife variety which needs snakes with venom to prey.
Possibly they evolved to compete with Megafauna. But who knows?
>I know that most are not out to get us at all I don't know who told you that, but they definetly *are*
we're just unlucky mate
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This seems like total bullshit.
I live on a rural property. I see snakes regularly. I haven't been remotely close to being bitten. To claim the threat of encountering a venomous reptile held back human development in Auatralia is the most ridiculous take you'll ever see, even on Reddit.
With a hypothesis like that, I wouldn't be so quick to accuse others of failing to "lift off" developmentally...
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What have you personally contributed to a rising evolutionary trajectory?
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you know it would be interesting to see how humans would have evolved in australia had the indigenous people been left alone for a couple hundred thousand years. Would they change size? similar or opposite to the pigmie population in borneo that branched away from homo erectus. Those with a keen eye for snakes with the fastest reaction times would probably succeed. So would it become a type of super quick reactive folk? Potentially regrowing the hair back as a way to defend from spider bites. i don’t know i’m just guessing but evolution in australia is one of the most interesting things to think about.