Odd timing. I'm procrastinating while I should be writing my talk about the management of envenomation - snakes, spiders, marine nasties and platypus, Australia's only venomous mammal.
Whilst there are many venomous beasties (and I'm sorry, the great Douglas is perhaps stretching the truth for humourous effect), there are very few poisonous beasties. A couple of turtles, and blowfish, and that's about it.

2 major venomous spiders. Gazillions of venomous snakes, in 5 major groups. However, in downtown Sydney you're much more likely to encounter funnelweb spiders than snakes. At least Australian venomous snakes are shy and tend to run away, unlike the funnelweb, which is a psycho aggressive bastard.

He's right about the ocean though. You'd be mad to go swimming. The threat of Irukanji kept me out of the Timor Sea last month, despite the stunning beauty of the water and the heat of the day.

And thanks - those photos will be great in my talk! Now to track down a copy of the photo of a (nonvenomous) croc eating a (nonvenomous) shark...

Edited at 2008-05-29 01:14 pm (UTC)

How's this for statistics? We've had a funnel web spider AND a red-belly black snake in our pool. Admittedly, the spider had expired, but the snake was very much alive and swimming (and so were we when we discovered this).

This is where the net with the looooooong handle comes in handy.

Agreed. Or as Mark Twain said of Australia, "The snakes in this region may be divided into one species: the venomous."

I have a mild phobia of all snakes as a result (I haven't quite recovered from seeing a picture of an almost perfectly camouflaged Gaboon viper in a National Geographic last week), though fortunately I'm not arachnophobic. I like to tell friends who are, that I've had my finger less than a centimetre from the fangs of a live funnelweb spider. Fortunately, of course, nearly all of that distance was toughened glass.

Yep. It all started with the nest of baby water mocassins in Huckleberry Finn. Scarred me for life.

I met a taipan in March. I was 1 metre from it. I made the mistake of asking if it had been milked. So I really ought to say "I met an exceedingly venomous tapian in mMrch."

I would say "forgive me" but it gives me great pleasure to know that finally something I wrote has made you sudder from something other than the lack of writing quality .