Venomous
Engineered biochemical cocktails delivered through fangs, stingers, spurs, or harpoons to disable nervous systems or dissolve tissue.
Gila Monster
Bead-armored venomous lizard, grooved chewing teeth, and Sonoran Desert survivor.
Hispaniolan Solenodon
An ancient island insectivore whose venom, lab tests suggest, lowers blood pressure but fails to paralyse invertebrates.
House Centipede
The night hunter on 15 pairs of legs, with back legs that on adult females are nearly twice as long as its body.
Inland Taipan
Rated the most toxic venom of any snake in lab tests on mice, carried by a shy snake whose handful of known bite victims all survived.
Irukandji Jellyfish
A box jellyfish that fishes for larval fish by twitching its tentacles like lures.
King Cobra
Up to eighteen feet of hooded crown, growling acoustic hiss, and specialized predator of other snakes.
Komodo Dragon
The largest living lizard, armored in bone and equipped with iron-coated serrated teeth and anticoagulant venom.
Red Imported Fire Ant
An ant a few millimetres long that links up with its nestmates into a raft that can float for days.
Red Lionfish
Swims at half its prey's speed and still wins six lab chases in ten.
Russell's Viper
A South Asian viper whose venom varies across India, enough that one antivenom did poorly against snakes from the semi-arid north in mouse tests.
South American Bushmaster
The longest of all vipers, able to aim a strike in the dark by body heat alone, from the only pit vipers in the Americas that lay eggs.
Southern Black Widow
Shiny black spider whose venom floods the nerve-muscle junction with acetylcholine and noradrenaline.
Southern Stingray
A diamond-shaped digger that flaps its fins to uncover prey and finds it by its electric field.
Spitting Spider
A tiny house spider that entangles prey from a distance with a zigzag spray of silk, glue and venom, fired at up to 28.8 meters a second.
Sunda Slow Loris
The deceptively cute nocturnal primate whose elbow-gland secretion carries a protein closely resembling a cat allergen.
Sydney Funnel-Web Spider
Male venom carries a nerve toxin that likely evolved to deter bandicoots and birds, and is lethal to humans by unfortunate coincidence.
Timber Rattlesnake
The big eastern pit viper that senses heat, waits in ambush and rattles a warning first.
Western Diamondback Rattlesnake
A desert pit viper with a heat-sensing pit on each side of its head. In one study, fasting snakes lost 30% of their body mass over 168 days.
Western Honeybee
A forager who dances flower coordinates with her whole body, and dies giving her sting.