Was just looking this over at The Straight Dope:
Poison is nature's great equalizer. Snakes, spiders, Gila monsters, duck-billed platypuses โ they're all prepared to stick it to you before you stick it to them. According to my consultant Doug, the most potent venom of any land animal probably belongs to the inland taipan, a central Australian snake. For a 150-pound person, the LD-50 works out to two milligrams โ about the weight of five dandelion seeds. The deadliest marine animal is a tougher call because estimates of venom toxicity vary greatly. Some nominate the hook-nosed sea snake or box jellyfish, but at least their venom is treatable. In contrast, if you're bitten by the blue-ringed octopus or consume too much inexpertly prepared fugu (puffer fish), no antidote can save you.
These last two cases illustrate the importance of a poison's delivery system. Both animals employ the same fatal substance, tetrodotoxin, but where the octopus purposely injects it as a venom, killing in minutes, the puffer fish is just poisonous to eat, with digestion metering the dose. If you're one of the 30-plus victims each year, you'll feel numbness and paralysis creep over you, fully aware but unable to do anything except die within four to six hours. The most poisonous animal substance is batrachotoxin, produced by the poison arrow frog of South America. As little as the weight of two grains of table salt will turn your lights out for good.
more: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/070518.html
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Poison is nature's great equalizer. Snakes, spiders, Gila monsters, duck-billed platypuses โ they're all prepared to stick it to you before you stick it to them. According to my consultant Doug, the most potent venom of any land animal probably belongs to the inland taipan, a central Australian snake. For a 150-pound person, the LD-50 works out to two milligrams โ about the weight of five dandelion seeds. The deadliest marine animal is a tougher call because estimates of venom toxicity vary greatly. Some nominate the hook-nosed sea snake or box jellyfish, but at least their venom is treatable. In contrast, if you're bitten by the blue-ringed octopus or consume too much inexpertly prepared fugu (puffer fish), no antidote can save you.
These last two cases illustrate the importance of a poison's delivery system. Both animals employ the same fatal substance, tetrodotoxin, but where the octopus purposely injects it as a venom, killing in minutes, the puffer fish is just poisonous to eat, with digestion metering the dose. If you're one of the 30-plus victims each year, you'll feel numbness and paralysis creep over you, fully aware but unable to do anything except die within four to six hours. The most poisonous animal substance is batrachotoxin, produced by the poison arrow frog of South America. As little as the weight of two grains of table salt will turn your lights out for good.
more: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/070518.html
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