Eli5: Why is it that everything in Australia is the most poisonous/venomous? Snakes/spiders/plants?

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Other places have plenty of poisonous shit, but the most worst of every category are all in Australia? What is it about Aus that causes that?

In: Biology

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I’d always been told (maybe wrongly) that in an environment with sparse resources and large distances, you better get (and eat) what you attack. If you have to expend too much energy to get a rare meal, you’re not likely to survive to spread your genes and evolve.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Australia doesn’t actually have that many poisonous/venomous (poisonous actually isn’t the right term hear, a snake that bites you and injects you with something isn’t poisonous, it’s venomous, while something that you eat and then kills you is poisonous, basically venom bites you, you bite poison.) l animals in it. Just for brevity purposes I’m gonna just keep saying poisonous in the rest of this post, but I mean poisonous/venomous.

Brazil and Mexico both have more poisonous species than Australia does.

Really, all tropical areas have on average more of some form of poisonous animal, the most common being spiders or snakes/reptiles. The theory behind this is that since the tropics have more energy on average (more sunlight, which makes more plants, which makes more animals that eat plants) it is easier to sustain a high energy activity like making your own poison, compared to more northern/souther climates.

Really, Australia just gets a lot of media/meme attention, particularly cuz it has the platypus, the only poisonous/venomous mammal, but in total numbers it really isn’t that crazy.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It doesn’t. The media just likes to amplify anything venemous or poisonous in Australia. But we’re a developed, stable country so lots of people from other developed countries visit here and haven’t had much experience watching out for things like spiders/snakes so they think it’s a huge deal. South America and Southern Africa have more dangerous animals but often people are worrying more about the humans as that’s what the media tells them to watch out for.

I lived in Mexico and had people say Australia sounds ‘so scary because of all the dangerous animals’ and I’d be like ‘you are driven to school in an armoured van and have 24/7 security but you think Australia is scary??’. Anyway, point is that humans are far scarier than animals. Animals are, for the most part, predictable.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I think some of it comes from the fact Australia has no large predatory animals apart from crocodiles up north and Aussies like to talk up how “dangerous” it is in the bush.