This is a Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Lucy Wong.

Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?

Movies like Raiders of The Lost Ark, snakes on a plane, and even Harry Potter and the Chamber of

Secrets have all relied on the fear of snakes to build suspense and anxiety. About a third of all people are at least a bit

phobic about snakes. Some of the distress when it comes to the slithering

serpents comes from their unpredictable movement patterns but the fear

also stems from knowing that well snake bites do kill a lot of people

perhaps as many as 94,000 people annually.

But not all snake venom is created equal.

Some snakes have venom only strong enough to kill a couple of mice.

On the other hand, there there's the inland Taiwan in Australia

which is incredibly venomous. It has enough potent venom to kill like about 50

adults humans. Kevin Healy a lecturer in zoology at the National University of humans. Kevin Healy, a lecturer in zoology at the National University of Ireland

Galway. He wanted to know why snake venom toxicity varied so much. So he and his

team looked at 102 different venomous snake species.

They examined how much venom the snakes had,

as well as what they ate and what kind of habitat they lived in.

The key finding?

Bigger snakes have more venom in general, but the amount of the increase of that venom

increases basically according to how much energy you burn per second. not how big your prey is as you'd expect.

The study was in the journal Ecology Letters.

The researchers also found snakes that inhabited three-dimensional environments that included

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