Venom Evolution Part 1

Hello everyone, welcome back to Evolution of venom part one, today’s blog topic about venom evolution. Before we start covering venom evolution, a brief recap: Venom is a toxin produced by an organism’s specialized tissue that is used for predation/defensive purposes.

 

There are a number of theories that argue on how venom has evolved over time, one argument suggests that venom evolved by positive Darwinian selection where prey animals began to evolve a resistance to the predator’s venom, in turn causes the predator’s venom to become more potent to this change (Sunagar, K. & Moran, Y. 2015).

 

Another argument by (Harris, R. & Arbuckle, K. 2016) suggest that venom evolved into two strategies by macro evolutionary diversification called biosynthesis and sequestration. Biosynthesis is when venom is produced by an animal’s specialized glands, while sequestration is where a animal obtains the toxins used for venom from their diet or an environmental source (Harris, R. & Arbuckle, K. 2016).

 

In next week’s blog post, we’ll cover more theories about venom evolution, below are the 2 article used in this post if anyone want to read more about this. 

 

Harris, R. & Arbuckle, K. 2016, "Tempo and Mode of the Evolution of Venom and Poison in Tetrapods", TOXINS, vol. 8, no. 7, pp. 193.

 

Sunagar, K. & Moran, Y. 2015, "The Rise and Fall of an Evolutionary Innovation: Contrasting Strategies of Venom Evolution in Ancient and Young Animals: e1005596", PLoS Genetics, vol. 11, no. 10.