Why don venomous animals poison themselves?
If snakes and all of these venomous animals have very potent toxin, what happens if the animal bites itself? Snakes and other venomous animals also have to have the neuromuscular junction. From an evolutionary perspective, there is pressure on the snake to have a toxin that works against a wide variety of animals. This is because if you have a toxin that is potent against so many taxa, then you have many more choices of food sources and you have a much more potent weapon to defend yourself. There were some papers published in the 1970s that explain why some groups of venomous snakes are resistant to their venoms. These papers showed that the vipers, including the North American pit vipers, have some humoral factors in their blood, in their circulation, which will neutralize the venom once it gets into the blood, and there won’t be any problem. Nobody has looked at if cobras use the same mechanism, so I began a research project to look at why cobras do not poison themselves and am hopin
