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.

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.