That said, a fully realised bite has the potential to kill 75 men, and is lethal within 30-45 minutes if untreated. This is shorter than the coastal taipan and consequently, they inject only 1/3 as much venom per bite. Per millilitre, it’s the most toxic venom on earth, but an inland taipan has fangs which are only 3.5mm to 6.2mm long. The only saving grace for the inland taipan’s victims is that their fangs are so short. The latter can kill a fully-grown elephant in a few hours. In comparison, a diamondback rattlesnake scores 11.4mg/kg, the black mamba scores 0.32mg/kg, and the feared king cobra scores 0.565mg/kg. The inland taipan’s LD50 was calculated at 0.025mg/kg.
This is a simple, reliable measurement of venom potency: it measures the quantity of any substance (there’s even a figure for sugar) required to kill 50% of animals exposed to it. It comes from the LD50 test devised in the 1970s. It’s said to be 50 times more toxic than an Indian cobra’s venom, although the cobra has the advantage when it comes to aggression.Ī common factoid is that one drop of inland taipan venom is enough to kill 250,000 mice, and this originated from a closely related truth. The inland taipan’s venom is a toxic soup of biological chemicals which wages war on any animal it is injected into. © Wikimedia Commons User: AllenMcC / CC BY-SA 3.0 It’s probably lucky that that’s the case… They’re shy animals which are normally only glimpsed as a quick flash of a black tail. Inland taipans only bite humans if they feel seriously threatened. The average length for females is 2 metres, just shorter than a black mamba at 2.4 metres.
Its main territory is southwest Queensland and south-east Northern Territory, and all the remote border areas between them. The former commonly appears in inhabited areas of Australia, but the inland taipan is somewhat of an enigma, rarely encountered apart from on punishing expeditions inland to the heart of the Australia bush. It belongs to the taipan family, AKA Oxyuranus, which is relatively small, with only two other members: the costal taipan (fairly common), and the much rarer Central Ranges taipan, only discovered in 2007. But in terms of venom potency, rather than people killed, the deadliest land-dwelling snake is actually the inland taipan of Australia. They can raise themselves off the ground with just a third of their body supporting them, and those old myths of black mambas coiling themselves into car wheels and staying put for 40 miles don’t help. The snake with the deadliest reputation in the world has to be the black mamba.
Inland taipan venom license#
Source: “Australia Zoo Brown Snake” by John– Under Creative Commons license
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