Being bitten by an Australian tiger snake is a wholly unpleasant experience

Saturday, September 2nd, 2017

Being bitten by an Australian tiger snake is a wholly unpleasant experience:

Within minutes, you start to feel pain in your neck and lower extremities — symptoms that are soon followed by tingling sensations, numbness, and profuse sweating. Breathing starts to become difficult, paralysis sets in, and if left untreated, you’ll probably die. Remarkably, the venom responsible for these horrifying symptoms has remained the same for 10 million years — the result of a fortuitous mutation that makes it practically impossible for evolution to find a counter-solution.

[...]

The secret to tiger snake venom has to do with its biological target — a clotting protein called prothrombin. This critically important protein is responsible for healthy blood clotting, and it exists across a diverse array of animal species (humans included). Any changes to this protein and the way it works can be catastrophic to an animal, leading to life-threatening conditions such as hemophilia. It’s this vulnerable target that makes the tiger venom so potent, but at the same time, animals are under intense evolutionary pressure to maintain prothrombin in its default, functional state. As Fry explained in a release, if the animals had any variation in their blood clotting proteins, “they would die because they would not be able to stop bleeding.”

Leave a Reply