Mia F I thought it was a goddamn arms race

Jay Barnacle nooo, not now

XD

now THAT is a great pun! "Arms race" is horrrrrible though! He just couldn't think of a better pun to do what you just did here! Mice aren't trying to develop "arms" (venom) at all. Neither mice nor snakes have true arms, nor is racing to get them. What's the arms race???

you laugh

they're immune to their Venom

ibanez1403 Kingsnakes aren't even venimous but are resistant to venom, enabling them to eat rattlesnakes and such,

ibanez1403 Consuming venom doesn't affect you the same as being bitten, some snake venoms has drug like effects when drunk. We can consume deadly venom and be ok.

SirGooglinMort Smith if you happen to have an ulcer or a cut in your mouth , something thats exposing the bloodstream you'd be dead, it would be a risk

they don't have vemon because they use their large bodies to strangle their prey to death

there teeth are curved backwards so when they strike at there prey the prey cant get away like a fish hook. Then they rap their bodies around the prey and constrict it to death then swallow it whole. So there is no need for venom

Kamal Gill and its always going to kill its prey with this technique

Hognose snakes have a rear-fanged system and are slightly venomous.

The snakes evolved and natural selection made their method of killing by constriction instead of poison

I've seen studies on squirrels that seem to have developed an immunity to rattlesnake venom.

Not unless you have a cut in your throat or on the way down to your stomach. It is venom not poison. If you swallowed poison you would die. The only way venom would kill you if it had a way into your bloodstream.

clayton dixon Correct. Most venom is just specific combinations of proteins. So.... digestible.

Yea. You ever heard of Bane?

clayton dixon IamScott351W Thanks for answering. Seems like that makes sense, yeah. I'd imagine that if you have some kind of venom that also has enzymes that decompose flesh in it, it could probably get in your bloodstream anyway. I've heard pineapples contain an enzyme that decomposes flesh, so seems to me that isn't too farfetched. Just increase the concentration of that enzyme and you've got yourself a nice flesh-eating venom. >:D PS: I hope I didn't give any snakes or spiders any ideas here...

There are drinks in India made from cobra venom. It's pretty safe to drink, unless you have an open wound in your mouth or throat.

I love venom. Not this venom: marvel venom

I find this really interesting because in my language venom and poison is the same word, funny enough it's called "gift", but anyway, I've wondered about that, how they are different.

I was turned into a newt once. But I got better.

Kell Titan Actually it dates back to shitty cartoons with magicians that say walla instead of voilà. Thus making many Americans and other English speakers say Walla. Nobody questions it as it stayed. It irks me to no end. I am Texan, know Spanish and German, and feel like I have a pretty decent grasp of languages, but am by no means an expert on any one language. I just wish people would stop using walla. It is up to us to correct them so they don't continue to make the same mistakes, and hopefully in the future voilà will be more widely used instead of that awfully made up word called walla. Your friendly KZfaq Grammar Nazi

There's always gene mutation happening and variation in a population. The snakes that happen to have more poisonous venom or more efficient venom whatever were probably more likely to survive and reproduce. This means the snake population evolve to become more venomous :)

scientist don't know either. They always say the same thing. "Well, it just mutated". Gee, thanks for clearing tha one up... like science has answered all the other questions about evolution. It mutated.

Mutation is one of the only ways a new gene can enter a gene pool. Often a mutation isn't like a huge change but more of a step in the right direction. If a gene mutation survives and is able to reproduce (well the organism with the mutation not the mutation itself), it must be good for the species.

***** Such a fucking facepalm comment.

TadaGanIarracht sorry I don't bow at the alter of pseudo-science. Things evolve and de-evolve, yes, but all cases were never a mutation. What species don't use, they lose. I've only witnessed de-evolution in fish; never saw evolution in any species.

If it didn't work, the snake would die from starvation not passing its useless gene. Survival of the fittest...

Kirill Shestakov That's the point of natural selection... genes don't think! It is based on luck (environment.) When a parent species procreate, their children will bear slightly random genes based on their parent's genes. (This is why if you have siblings, you don't exactly look like clones.) Whichever one of those lucky offspring survives within enough time that they can reproduce new random variation themselves though sexual reproduction wins.

Kirill Shestakov Oh dear, I see where this is heading. You're a religious person.

Kirill Shestakov You know what else is laughable? People who watches shows they obviously disagree about or dislike just so they can say how much they disagree about it. Laughable people are bound to ridicule.

It didn't know and the mutation was not specific. Mutation happens all the time. I carry mutant genes, you do as well. Stuff happens, even to DNA. And if it happens to a germ cell, the kids get the mutation. Most mutations are harmless; they might for example make some people have smelly urine after eating asparagus. Or they might allow a protein that is produced in the pancreas - a protein for which there is already a genetic code - that protein might additionally be produced in the mouth. But the snake does not know that, nor would it understand. It just likes to eat mice, the furry little things. But this mutant snake now has an advantage. Mice that it bites stop fighting, so it gets to eat more. You'd be amazed how often prey escapes in the wild, btw. A predator is lucky if it can survive. Anyhow, our well-fed snake lives longer, resists disease better because he's nourished better than the poor chap in the next burrow; that guy only has this protein in his pancreas, the poor sap. So our lucky snake has babies, and those babies who get this lucky gene are able to eat better, so they have more babies, and more robust babies... while those poor saps without the protein are barely eking out a living. And after a few generations - well, if you're a snake without this protein, you won't live very long. There just isn't enough prey to share. Not only does this happen all the time btw - mutations moving the site of production, for example, or duplicating production of a protein in two places, but there are other mutations that might produce more or less of the same protein. Often this results in nothing, sometimes it results in disease, and sometimes - ah, sometimes you get lucky. And it's quite reasonable that a protein intended for one application finds a use in another role - biology is built of largely the same blocks, over and over. I use these tools in research and it's amazing how much is recycled.

Why snakes have venom? Simple, they need to feed like anybody else and to feed you have to kill. That is their way of doing it.

Mitche23 but they wouldn´t need to evolve the venom to kill...there are many other ways, why the venom? and why almost every snake on the earth has it, and an other predator don´t.

Daniel Zagora That is called in one word adaption. Some evolve venom, some evolve constriction. It depends on environment where the animal is located.

Daniel Zagora A majority of snakes in the world are non-venomous.

yeah god hahahaha

The snake would be poisonous if you blended a venomous snake and drank it and got sick, though. 8D /morbid thoughts.

WinterWhiteFox214 No, that'd just be gross. The venom would have to enter your blood stream. Which would require a cut or other internal injury which, considering you're blending an animal with spintery bones going down the entire length of it's body, wouldn't be that difficult to find...o'course at that rate the bones would be the thing that kills you.

WinterWhiteFox214 Venom can be consumed, some venoms have drug like effects but it won't affect you anything like if you were bitten. The proteins in the venom are broken down in the stomach so by the time its in your bloodstream its some what different from its original state.

Except that you're wrong and there actually are snakes that are poisonous, including the Tiger Keelback. Look it up.

Sebastian Frost iknow ur comment is months old but I'm thinking some of the pray got bitten but didn't die maybe not enough venom or a mutation and it passed it on and more and more immune pray kept on multiplying while the non immune kept dying .

Only if their pray requires it.

They are.

Try and let us know, ok ? :)