All monitors have "venom" in their saliva?

[Hulihzack]

Zack:

Komodos were widely thought to kill prey by septicemia - bacterial infections of the blood - that was proven to be untrue.

The problem with that theory is that the death of large prey occured too quickly to be attributable to systemic bacterial poisoning. It's one of those urban legend things - sort of. While they have a mouth full of many strains of nasty bacteria, that's not what was causing rapid swelling and blood pressure/clotting changes.

Thanks for clearing that up, clearly as far as I knew was not very far.

Venom in some lizards including varanids is really old news, I'm surprised this still comes up on message boards (seemingly always with some guy answering "no it's bacteria"). 2002 called, it wants its misinformation back.

Just because it was discovered several years ago does not mean it is common knowledge.