At first I was just going to make a thread to gawk at how cool Cone Snails are but then it got me wondering…
No matter how I look at it, venom/poison in organisms has to be the most remarkable natural weapon nature has equipped life with, but also the most random and weirdest.
I mean, just look at the Cone Snail. Are these things some of the weirdest quirks of evolution ever? An animal that moves a couple inches and spends most of its life practically stationary is equipped with a custom made harpoon that it can shoot and one of the most potent and complex chemical wienertails on the planet that they can mix and match on the fly for different purposes? Some of them can even release venomous insulin into the water to make fish moronic and lethargic, why wasn’t this shit tricked out on something that would make more frequent and effective use of it?
Then look at constrictor snakes or just regular snakes in general. Why was the shift made from “lightning quick agile body that can kill with just one bite!” to “lol just bite/crush it to death”? Or did the venomous snakes come later? What the hell genes/factors ‘selects’ and enables for an animal to go “wow, I could really use a lethal substance to make my life easier” and develop venom in the first place, seeing as it’s so widespread across so many different animals and so many different species?
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What it feels like when the pussy is loose
If it’s slow moving it would make sense it would need something to even the playing field, the insulin web is fricking sick though, it literally induces hypoglycemic shock in fish, no clue why that’s not a more common venom strategy in animals.
unrelated but if life exists on colder places like titan then they would see us as lava monsters that piss and spit hot magma.
That would be cool. Imagine pissing on them and just melting them into a puddle of biomatter.
I dunno pal. Being able to produce your own lighting/electricity seems more remarkable. Venom seems more common because there's plengy of poisonous plants, insects, etc.
Isn’t that caused by bacteria? Electrical animals are definitely cool too.
Chemical warfare. Snakes, snails, octopuses, stonefish, ants, wasps, bees, frogs, toads, lizards, spiders, scorpions, centipedes, beetles. Not to mention countless plants and fungi.
Mammals and birds are about the only sizeable taxa I can think of that haven't developed venom/poison/chemical weapons/chemical deterrents.
But then you have things like venomous platypuses and stinky skunks, so maybe it's just birds that haven't developed it. But then again chicken shit is pretty vile.
>birds
Even birds have that one with the poisonous feathers, can’t remember the name
There’s also Slow Lorises, they have poison they can secrete from their elbows or something
Overall it’s clearly something all life has found a use for. Pretty neat
I always wondered how far they can shoot the harpoon on land. Seems to be very limited in the water with how close they need to get
damn dat homie gettin vore’d
Humans already have venom, they just produce it externally instead of internally.
At the end of the day it just goes to show how insanely humongous our brain is, that it can replicate every specialized animal organ at the same time, without the downsides of having to carry it with you
Btw iirc it's believed that platypuses' venom glands are actually an archaic characteristic from the ancestor of all mammals but we(non platypuses) lost it in favour of allocating more resources to the brain
you callin' me stupid?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_snake_venom?useskin=vector
this is outside the realm of Wauf armchair expertise
We should have had venomous spit…
I have some poisonous weapons of my own (my farts)
humans actually have salivary glands in our upper lips that are analogous to some reptile venom glands, so to something out there we may already.