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Spidey Non-Sense


I've recently been to Japan and whilst there came across one scary looking spider. An Australian girl helpfully informed me that it was called a Golden Orb spider, however she didn't supply me with the information as to whether it could kill me or not. Judging by the vivid "I will kill you" colouring I decided to keep my distance. The only problem was the sheer density of them in this small Japanese forest garden I'd visited. Added to this, they produced their orb shaped webs in trees and annoyingly always around head height, I therefore found myself flushed with panic whenever I turned. Lest to say I never made it to the Coi Carp lake in the midst of the forest.

Later when I returned to the UK I researched my curious East Asian arachnoid and found out that they do contain some venom (as apparently to my ignorance all spiders do), but that it was relatively harmless to vertebrates. However, if anyone is reading this for information due to a search on "Orb spider's poisonous or not", be warned this isn't from a credible source, but based on a top rated Yahoo answer.

Increasing my search on poisonous insects I came across a deceptively posionous sea snail, which apparently has the most deadly neurotoxin in the world. This shelled miniature killer may seem innocuous enough, but fires small darts to harpoon and instantly kill passing fish. It's been foud that this venom is toxic enough to down a shark... Now when I think about the necessity for a 4cm snail to kill a 1.5m shark I can't instantly lay my finger on why. Before asking the question why however, is the question of how? How has evolution somehow adorned this mollusc with relative demi-god power for it's size. Maybe to highlight the saying of "pick on someone your own size" to those sharks bold enough to attack a snail. Here's a short video of the snail, with added voice over and editing to try and give this snail the scariest image possible...

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