#Cone snail venom skin#

In extreme cases symptoms include respiratory paralysis, vision impairment, and muscle paralysis. Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Richard LingĪ cone snail sting can result in tingling, swelling, numbness, and intense pain. A single drop of this snail’s venom is powerful enough to kill 20 adult humans! While some animal’s venom may be deadlier, none cane do so much damage with so little.

These snails certainly are lovely, but they’re as deadly as they are beautiful.

I’m not even talking about the death-starker scorpion, which, to be honest, you think would have the others beat based on its name alone. It’s not the blue-ringed octopus either, though they hold enough poison in their bodies to take out 26 people in a matter of minutes. You might be surprised to learn that it’s not the venomous king cobra, whose bite can kill an adult human in 15 minutes. Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons/SeascapezaĪnd while the box jelly is typically referred to as the most venomous animal on the planet, there’s another animal that’s giving it a run for its money. The immediate pain is so intense that upon being stung it’s not uncommon for people to be sent into shock, which often leads to death by drowning. Oh, and they’re in pain for weeks after the encounter. So deadly, in fact, that humans rarely survive being stung by one, and when they do they’re left with scarring from where they were attacked.

#Cone snail venom skin#

It's really fascinating what these animals are capable of.Did you know that the venom of a box jelly attacks not only the heart and nervous system, but skin cells as well? They’re known to be one of the most deadly animals in the world. 'A colleague of mine recently showed that some cone snails use toxins that mimic mating pheromones to lure worms out of their burrows. 'We know very little about the various ways that cone snails use their venom in the wild,' she says. These are just a few strategies, but according to Safavi, with so much diversity in cone snail venom, we have a lot to learn: All the snail has to do is follow its prey and gobble it up when it reaches it. The fish will swim away, but will fall under the influence of the snail's venom pretty quickly. Other cone snails will strike a fish but won't tether it with their harpoon. Other cone snails, like the geographer cone, creep up on sleeping fish and shoot out a cloud of chemicals – one of which is insulin - that numbs their prey and sends them into a sort of hypoglycemic coma before swallowing them whole. All the snail has to do is reel its prey into its giant parachute-like mouth and spit the bones out a couple of hours later. With a tube-like structure at the end of a venom bulb, and a modified tooth that can shoot out of the tube at 400 miles per hour (644 kilometers per hour), instantly incapacitating passing prey, it doesn't really matter if cone snails are slowpokes. Compared to snakes and even scorpions and spiders, death from cone snail stings are extremely rare.'Ĭone snails might not have fangs, but most have a venom-covered harpoon they use to incapacitate their prey. It's also one of the species that can inject larger quantities of venom compared to most other cone snails. 'Some of the toxins in this species can cause acute respiratory failure and potentially heart failure. 'There are about 40 known fatalities by cone snails and nearly all - if not all - were caused by a single species, Conus geographus, commonly known as the geography cone,' says Safavi. With each species making several hundreds of toxins, one can estimate that there are around half a million different toxins present in cone snails.'īecause their venoms are unique to specific species, some species deliver a very minor sting, and others can kill you. 'Even very closely related species have only around 5 to 10 percent overlap. 'This shows how fast these toxins evolve,' says Safavi. One of the most remarkable things about the 1,000-ish species of cone snail is that there is almost no overlap in the toxins that are made by each.