Cold Blooded Killers

From venomous snakes to great white sharks to poison arrow frogs. Everything you need to know about animals that bite, sting, chomp and poison. Learn about - How to understand the "LD50" test that measures venom potency Why the world's most venomous creature isn't a snake, spider or jellyfish How the Komodo dragon is able to kill prey with one bite (Hint - it's not just its poor oral hygiene) Whether the Sydney Funnel-Web or the Brazilian Wandering Spider is the world's deadliest. Oh, and don't forget the Six-Eyed Sand Spider... How the world's most venomous snake has never killed anyone, yet a much less potent snake kills tens of thousands of people every year. And even this doesn't come close to the creature that kills more than a million people each and every year. This is not another serious encyclopedic reference to deadly animals (there are enough of those already ). Peter Elliott and his team of lowly paid researchers have spent months trawling through research papers and expert interviews to distill everything down to the most interesting and entertaining facts. Peter has spent almost every waking hour researching the animals in this books, to the extent that his dreams are now filled with Funnel-Web Spiders and a recurring nightmare where he is a Cape Fur Seal swimming in False Bay of the South African coast (This may be due to the fact that the author has a body fat percentage roughly approximating an adult seal). While Peter wakes up in a cold sweat each night, sure that Funnel-Web spiderlings have made a nest in his mouth while he slept, you can profit from his suffering with the most entertaining book on dangerous animals you are likely to read. The book covers only the most interesting and toxic snakes, spiders, scorpions, sharks, crocodiles, lizards and the dizzying array of things that will kill you if you dare to go into the water off Australia. Plus a clear explanation of the LD50 system for measuring how potent a particular venom is.