What are the criteria for judging a creature’s…um…poisonosity? (poisonness? poisitude? poisality?) Does “most poisonous” mean “capable of producing the largest amount of poison”, or does it mean “capable of producing the most deadly poison”, or does it mean “capable of producing the fastest-acting poison”, or some combination of the three?

I can tell you this: if you had accidentally picked up, say, a rattlesnake, you’d be dead or in the hospital right now. Rattlesnake poison isn’t the most deadly in the world, but a barely poisonous critter what bites you is always more likely to kill you than an extremely poisonous critter what requires you to bite it (or lick your fingers).

Not that that’ll keep me from calling you The Salamander Hunter. Crikey!

Well, it varies a great deal. I b’lieve it’s “capable of producing the most deadly poison” where most deadly is “fatal in smallest dose”.

Poisonous means that if you eat it, you get poisoned. Venomous means that it can inject poison into you. Rattlesnakes are venomous, not poisonous (though if you each the venom sacs, all bets are off).

Poisonous animals are often ranked according to how many mice the poison they contain could kill (25,000 in the case of the newt in question).

The poison that Taricha granularis produces is called tetrodotoxin. It’s 10000 times more deadly than cyanide. It’s the same stuff found in Fugu (that Japanese pufferfish delicacy that kills you if you cut it wrong) and a number of other marine animals. California newts pack the same poison, but in lesser amounts. It is one of the strongest non-protein poisons known to man. TTX works by blocking voltage-gated sodium channels. Basically, it turns off your periphial nervous system (it doesn’t penetrate to the brain). It starts with numbness, and proceeds to paralysis, respretory difficulties, cardiac arrhythmia, and death (in 4-6 hours). One is, however, conscious and often totally lucid through the entire process, however. Survivors of TTX have been declared dead only to revive moments before cremation. They remember everything about the experience.

However, T. granularis is not the world’s most poisonous animal. That title is generally given to Phyllobates terribilis, the Golden Poison Frog. One frog’s worth of poison can kill ~100 people.

According to this pageBatrachotoxin (the frog poison) is ten times more potent than Tetrodotoxin (the newt poison). It is the world’s most deadly non-protein poison. Similar to but different from TTX, Batrachotoxin (which is also a neurotoxin) operates by irreversably opening the sodium channels in your neurons, basically causing all your neurons to fire, constantly. Muscle contraction, paralysis, and cardiac arrest or suffocation result. Minimum lethal dose is around .016 micrograms for a 180 lb male human. When used by native columbians on darts, this stuff kills a howler monkey in less than a minute.

Our rough-skinned friend is the world’s most poisonous newt, and the most poisonous animal in the pacific northwest (if not north america), so he has plenty to be proud of.

Very interesting.

So what’s to stop, say, North Korea from raising hundreds of thousands of these frogs and salamanders in greenhouses and using the venom as a biological weapon? I’m sure the UN would throw a fit if they saw a suspicious new chemical plant get built, but who cares about a greenhouse full of pretty little frogs? Theoretically, couldn’t the extracted venom (or, to save time, the ground-up frog parts) be sprayed over a battlefield as a mist, inserted into water supplies and food, etc.?

And wouldn’t it be cool if the UN caught on and passed a resolution against the poor little frogs? I wander what the animal protection groups would say. That could be fun to watch.

It’s more likely that they could find a way to synthesize the chemicals.

The frogs are an interesting case. In captivity, they’re not poisonous. Some people postulate that they injest their poison instead of producing it themselves, which would make some unknown Amazonian insect or something the most poisonous animal. But no one has found such an insect, to my knowledge. To make a long story short, you can’t raise effective poison dart frogs in captivity.

The newts might be doable. But, the poison is pretty slow-acting, and must be ingested or injected. Chemical weapons need to be aerosol or gaseous. Plus, TTX lasts a really long time. One researcher stated that 11 years in storage didn’t seem to affect its potence. It’s like mustard gas in that way. This is no good for an invading army.

The ideal chemical weapon would be aerosol-delivered, fast-acting, deadly, and have a really short half-life (like an hour) so that the ground troops can move in the next day. You’d also have to be able to produce it with a minimum of fuss. Newt-rangling is probably a lot of trouble.

There are bacteria that produce toxic proteins more potent than either of these poisons. Bacteria are really easy to grow. Botulinum toxin, for example, is produced by the bacteria Clostridium botulinum. It is often cited as the most toxic substance known to man (it’s a protein, so it doesn’t compete in the same arena as newt and frog poison). You can make it on accident by canning food badly. Making it on purpose is probably even easier. But, you could also just buy it from a medical supply place ;)

Of course, BTX is kinda slow and treatable. But it’s just an example.

The OPCW has some good info on common chemical warfare agents.

Also, blue-green algae produce saxitoxin, which is about as bad as TTX. Algae is easy to grow too.

The newts get MORE poisonous in captivity.

And people keep them as pets. Guh.

My point was not that raising frogs would be easier to do than synthesizing chemicals, it was that raising frogs is not on the UN’s Big List of Naughty Things, whereas making chemical weapons is.

Sure, but if you then make chemical weapons out of the frogs, you’re violating the UN rules. And the extraction process (which I would guess is where you start breaking rules) is probably more work than synthesis.