Poisonous snakes and venomous pythons

[janeothejungle]

So, there are a couple poisonous snakes, notably garter snakes that eat rough-skinned newts

Wait, what? Do you have a citation for this? Garters are notably co evolving with the newts (i.e. Developing better sodium channel blockers to resist the toxins), but ingesting and neutralizing a poison does not automatically mean that the snake is then 'poisonous' (which generally implies the use of toxins as weapons or defense). Possible I missed a publication, but I'd be interested in seeing the reference on this.

http://https://phys.org/news/2014-11...nous-newt.html

Edit: I'm just going to assume you're going back to the Fry studies? Which begs an interesting question. Is a snake truly 'venomous' if it has no way to functionally use any of those ancient compounds?


~ Kat