Question: wat is the most venomous animal?

Drew Rae answered on 16 Jun 2011:

Hi Paul,
Venomous can be measured in different ways. We can talk about “How many people could one animal kill”, or “How quickly would you die if bitten by an animal”, or “What animal would need the smallest amount of poison to kill you”?

The way they used to measure venom was to inject mice. The venom was scored according to how much venom was needed to have a 50% chance of killing a mouse. To compare, you need to do all the tests with one laboratory at one time, since it differs depending on exactly how you inject the mouse. It is also rather ethically dubious to subject mice to agony just to see how fast they die, so they don’t do that anymore.

If you give the Indian Cobra a score of 1, the Inland Taipan of Australia has a score of 50. A puff adder or a king cobra don’t have as powerful venom, but they’ve got big fangs and inject you with more.

As you might gather from the above, you can’t really compare across different types of animals, because they sting in different ways. Box Jellyfish have incredibly dangerous venom, but they sting you, they don’t stick fangs into you. How do you compare this?