Credit: The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London and Callum Mair
Researchers from LSTM s Centre for Snakebite Research and Interventions (CSRI) have led an international team investigating the evolutionary origins of a novel defensive trait by snakes - venom spitting - and demonstrated that defensive selection pressures can influence venom composition in snakes in a repeatable manner.
In a paper published in the journal
Science, the team, which includes authors from the UK, USA, Australia, the Netherlands, Spain, Norway, Brazil and Costa Rica, provide the first example of snake venom evolution being demonstrated to be associated with a role in defence, rather than the wide consensus that venom evolution is driven solely for prey capturing-ability.