What is the most toxic snake?

Snakes are sneaky-even questions about them can wiggle right out of your grasp.

When Arocha Musa of Kampala, Uganda, wrote in asking, “What makes the cobra the most dangerous snake?” we quickly realized two things: Cobras aren’t considered the most dangerous snake, and finding out which is poses a challenge.

“If you’re playing Trivial Pursuit, the answer is the inland taipan,” quips Kate Jackson, a biologist at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

That’s because the inland taipan has both the most toxic venom and injects the most venom when it bites. A native of Australia that’s also called the “fierce snake,” the inland taipan packs enough venom to kill a hundred men in one bite, according to the Australia Zoo.

The standard measurement used to calculate venom potency is called lethal dosage, with an LD50 defined as what it would take to kill half a population of laboratory animals, usually mice.

Neurotoxic snake venom works by paralyzing the victim’s muscles, which in turn leads to respiratory arrest; hemotoxic venom works by breaking down the tissues.

The lower the LD50, the less venom it takes-meaning the more potent the venom.

The Australia Venom Research Unit keeps a list of the 25 snakes with the lowest LD50-which are thus the most toxic. The top five are the inland taipan, the eastern brown snake, the coastal taipan, the tiger snake, and the black tiger snake.

How Toxic? It Depends

Real life isn’t so simple. Both Jackson and Steven Seifert, director of the New Mexico Poison and Drug Information Center, emphasize that there are many other circumstances beyond potency that make a snake dangerous, such as the availability of health care and antivenom following a snakebite.

As Seifert puts it, “The most venomous snake is the one that bites you.”

According to the Global Snakebite Initiative, snake bites cause about 125,000 deaths a year worldwide. People get bit more often when they’re working outside or must be in places where contact with snakes is unavoidable, Seifert noted.

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