The World’s Most Toxic Venom - The Deadly Jellyfish
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00:00 Hi, I'm Jamie Seymour and welcome to James Cook University.
00:06 Welcome to my lab.
00:07 If it stings you, bites you and is liable to kill you, such as the animals and things
00:13 up here, I've either worked on it, I'm going to work on it, or we have worked on it.
00:19 There are some amazing animals in Australia to work on.
00:22 One of the ones I want to talk about is this guy, the big box jellyfish.
00:28 Probably arguably the most venomous animal on the planet.
00:31 Doesn't look much there in the container, but like most things in my lab, there will
00:37 be hundreds of them stored away.
00:40 So there's a box of box jellyfish, so to speak.
00:46 The interesting thing about big box jellyfish is not only are they capable of killing you
00:52 within minutes, but they've got 24 eyes, so they can see through their body.
00:59 360 degree vision.
01:01 Seriously amazing.
01:02 Lenses, retinas and pupils.
01:04 They can swim at the speed of an Olympic swimmer.
01:07 They're 96% water.
01:10 They sleep at night and they are active visual predators.
01:15 That's not bad for something at the bottom of the evolutionary tree.
01:20 When you look at the venom from these guys, which is in their tentacles, that's when the
01:24 story gets really interesting.
01:27 How do you get the venom from the box jellyfish?
01:29 Well, you cut the tentacles off and you put them in the fridge.
01:32 What you end up with is this.
01:38 Freeze dried box jellyfish venom.
01:41 Now, there's enough in there to kill, I don't know, probably half a dozen elephants.
01:46 That's how potent this stuff is.
01:49 When you look at it, it's really a complex venom as well.
01:52 There are several components to it.
01:54 Now, when you look at the bits that cause problems to us, they're the bits that attack
01:59 our heart and they're very specific.
02:01 There's two components to it and they act by what we refer to as synergism.
02:06 Now, a little bit of science here.
02:09 If I draw a graph and I have survival of cells up here.
02:19 That's a hundred percent survival and zero down here and I have time.
02:24 If I take whole box jellyfish venom, what you find is your cells die and they never
02:31 come back to life again.
02:32 And that happens in around about two minutes.
02:35 If I break that up and look at the two components, there's one component that does that, but
02:44 your cells come back to life again.
02:47 There's another bit that does this.
02:55 It takes longer to cause death, but you stay dead for the want of a better word.
03:01 Both those components together give you the world's most toxic venom in an animal on the
03:08 planet.
03:09 The first thing you realize is when you're stunned is instant tears in your eyes.
03:14 Think of a red hot knife dragged across your body, intensify that by a level of 10 and
03:20 hang onto it for about 20 minutes.
03:23 If it's less than two meters, it's not going to kill you.
03:25 It's just going to cause scars on your body.
03:27 And I've got some, there's a big one on that finger there.
03:31 It's another one down through here, a couple all over the place.
03:34 We usually get stunned when we're out working with these animals.
03:36 If you're at six foot, two meters where the tank will cross you, I've got to tell you,
03:40 there's not much I can do for you.
03:41 Fire out.
03:42 Fire out.
03:43 Fire out.
03:44 Fire out.
03:45 Fire out.
03:46 Oh, that hurt.
03:47 Oh, that really hurt.
03:48 A big sting, two meters of tentacle contact, 60, 120 seconds, and you're going home in
03:54 a body bag.
03:55 Yep, two minutes.
03:58 Nothing else kills quite as badly as this animal.
04:01 It's not all that bad though.
04:03 We do have an antivenom, which is made here in Australia.
04:07 Now it works reasonably well, but doesn't work quickly enough.
04:11 So what we're doing is we're playing around with a whole variety of other things to try
04:14 and work out, are there better ways in which we can save people?
04:18 That's another story though.
04:20 That's the nature of science.
04:22 [BLANK_AUDIO]