What is venom?

Hi to everyone who is reading this. My name is Stacey and this is a blog on the evolution of venom. This blog will not only cover the evolution of venom, but will also cover what is venom, what animals use venom and what venom can be used for. This first blog is going to cover on what venom is.

First off, what is venom? In order to understand what venom is, we need to understand what a toxin is.

A toxin is a chemical substance that is produced in the body of an organism that has an adverse effect on animals from different species/same species (Kundu et al., 2015).

Venom is a toxin that is produced in an organism by specialized tissue (Kundu, P, 2015) that is delivered by bites, stings, etc. Venom is used for both offensive/predation and defensive purposes in the animal kingdom (Sunagar & Moran, 2015).

In the next week blog post, we be covering on how venom evolve. Below are the 2 article used in this post if anyone want to read more about this. 

References: 

Kundu, P., Venkitachalam, S. & Vidya, T.N.C. 2015, "Why so toxic? Venom evolution in animals", Resonance, vol. 20, no. 7, pp. 617-627.

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