This is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher in D'Artata.

Got a minute?

It may not be the legendary matchup Squid versus Octopus, but imagine this fight.

Sea-dwelling cone snail versus tiny fish.

Who wins?

Well, true, the fish can dart away.

But the snail has chemical weapons.

So they use a whole cocktail of compounds and most of them are

neurotoxins and they just completely wipe out the prey's physiology right so the

prey cannot respond anymore.

Helen Asafavi, a biologist at the University of Utah.

She and her colleagues discovered that the cone snail's venom contains not only neurotoxins, but

insulin too, which the snail's prey taken through their gills.

And that insulin overdose causes the fish's blood sugar to plummet, depriving its brain of energy

and inducing a coma.

And that's what happens when you give people an insulin overdose.

You can cause coma and then death,

depending on the amount of insulin.

They report the findings in the journal Proceedings

of the National Academy of Sciences.

If this all sounds like something out of a murder mystery,

...