h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

-260.

Wow. That's impressive...

look what my score would be without the s!!!!!!!

That's what I get for being half-asleep; I'm only half awake!

Didn't you come near-top the previous year?

Watching your precipitous plummet this year has been fun. You really have been chasing that Alan Davies award, haven't you?

I do try and warn people: don't I say 'never obvious' at the start of each and every forum?

I figured there'd be tons of poison related quite-interesting snippets out there - but so far it's slim pickings and you've all been quite careful so far to avoid naming name, I note wryly.

>>While we are about it - any advances on how the winner of gold medal for the marathon at the 1904 Olympics came to drink a whisky that had been laced with Strychnine?<<

Did his own body generate it? The human body is a pretty amazing chemical factory and people are surprised by how lethal stuff it can, on occasions, create.

As for the poisonous birds - is it a cassowary? Not particular reason behind my guess, I just like the word. I do have a vague recollection of a bird with serrated shins that are poisonous in a similar way to a komodo dragon: the serrations pool huge amounts of neurotoxins and bacteria that kills pretty quickly.

Hi Iago,

No, he drank the whisky that had been deliberately laced.

Not the Cassowary, either.

Well, most of my guesses have been blown out of the water by the preceding posts. I think things like the fugu fish, portuguese man-o-war etc were probably klaxoned anyway so I'm *not* going to say them.

Amongst snakes, I think cobras are the most lethal (i.e. kill the most people) simply because of the number of barefoot people they come into contact with in India.

RF

Come, come, surely.....


On the other hand....


Cobra was that?

-5


Nasty, no doubt about it, but most definitely venomous. Interestingly, the King Cobra although it's venom can fell a full-grown elephant, it is not the most toxic snake, it's the amount of venom it's able to inject that makes it especially deadly.

As I'm going to be missing for a bit*, an appropriate juncture to make mention of another location where this deadly creature can be found, other than New Guinea, is round on t'other side in South America, specifically Colombia.





*seconds out round two with the job centre. I'm off to go and try and plead my guess to cynical ears. I am not a number. I am not a number... I am not a number....

Would it be some kind of worm?

Hi Clive,

There's a myth that the most poisonous creature is the two-inch-long golden poison frog "which shoots darts that knock monkeys out of the trees of Colombia's rainforests".

I hope you weren't going to say this, because the answer is surely the microbe Clostridium botulinum, which secretes Botulinum neurotoxin (BoNT), an agent responsible for the deadly food poisoning disease botulism and a dreaded biological weapon - one of the most toxic proteins known to humans (~100 billion times more toxic than cyanide).

Icy

Surely the frog would be a klaxon.

Hey, why don't we have a smiley?

We do - Crazy Frog:

This is pretty close as well:

RF

Or - it's green, at least...

did cross my mind, but I was too polite to say it.

As did

is it a type of monkey that becomes piosonous due to its diet

i saw something about monkeys eating clay to de-tox???

Snakes have 2 types of poison, haemotoxins and neurtoxins. Haemotoxins stop blood being ferried about the body, so you suffocate to death. Neurotoxins stop chemical messages being sent along your nervous system (I think it's got something to do with acetylcholine, which helps send the aforementioned signals), so your heart stops (and presumably your brain too) cos there aren't any messages telling it to beat any more.

I think those two classes of poison would be pretty generally widespread, but Ah dunno.

The marathon winner in 1904 (Hicks I think) took a mixture of strychnine, whisky and (I believe) eggs as a performance booster. Strychnine in small doses was, in those days used as a stimulant.

BTW - the 1904 marathon was initially won by Fred Lorz who rode in a car for part of the race. The car broke down some kms before the end so he jogged the rest of the way.

It was only when he was about to be presented with the medal that Lorz admitted what he had done and said that it was meant as a joke.

The Lorz story is one of my favourite Olympic tales

Hm...





Do you have 'venomous ex-partner' down as either the answer or a klaxon?