Faraway Australia is home to a great variety of venomous creatures, including spiders, snakes, jellyfish, octopuses, ants, bees and even platypuses. But the reasonable question is: why are there so many of these animals there?
According to Kevin Arbuckle, associate professor of evolutionary biology at Britain’s Swansea University, the Australian continent became a separate part of the landmass about 100 million years ago when it separated from the ancient supercontinent Gondwana. As the expert noted, the lineage of venomous insects is twice or three times further back than this separation.
Simply put, a number of venomous species were simply “stuck” in Australia after it became a separate part of the landmass. Arbuckle noted that some arthropods native to Australia also live in the tropics and subtropics. That said, among spiders, only Australian funnel-web spiders are native to the continent, and the ancestors of the Australian widow spider also predate the continent’s separation.
The same goes for cephalopods, which have been around for about 300 million years and lived in the waters around Australia even before it became a separate continent.
