or your players
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
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Venom vs poison
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venom
Venom goes in a cut. Poison is swallowed. You can swallow some venom without harm.
Poison is generic. Venom is specific to normal method of delivery (e.g. snakes and bees).
Swallowing venom may or may not hurt you. Probably not a great idea, but there’s a better chance you’ll be okay.
Getting a known poison stabbed/injected intravenously seems likely to be pretty effective, but it depends on the mode of action. Blood goes everywhere in the body, so it will likely find its target eventually.
My understanding was that toxin is the generic term, poison is usually ingested and venom is delivered into the blood? But it gets often confused in everyday language, and is only accurate when talking about animals. Not a toxicologist, so I might be wildly wrong
Now I'm curious what the most aggressive venom that can be ingested is
I remember some years ago that a bar in California was serving shots with black widow spiders in them. So, apparently you can eat the venom from a black widow without issue, and they’re pretty dangerous spiders.
Most of them would be denatured by stomach acidity but the risk of something like paradoxin finding a small route into your blood stream is too damn high.
When it comes to venom that is also used as a toxin in other species, though, and is a big killer of humans, the crown goes to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrodotoxin which is used as both a poison against predators for things like pufferfish and a venom for things like the blue ringed octopus.