Animal venom & bacteria

[NeilC]

I've noticed when watching wildlife programmes on the TV that many very venomous animals don't synthesise the toxins directly but utilise little pouches of symbiotic bacteria to do it for them.

Why is is? Is it just that evolution made use of some bacteria that happened to be toxic for competitive / antibiotic reasons or is it that bacteria are generally better at synthesising complex compounds, or something else?

 

[luchog]

I've noticed when watching wildlife programmes on the TV that many very venomous animals don't synthesise the toxins directly but utilise little pouches of symbiotic bacteria to do it for them.

Why is is? Is it just that evolution made use of some bacteria that happened to be toxic for competitive / antibiotic reasons or is it that bacteria are generally better at synthesising complex compounds, or something else?

Outsourcing.

 

[sphenisc]

I've noticed when watching wildlife programmes on the TV that many very venomous animals don't synthesise the toxins directly but utilise little pouches of symbiotic bacteria to do it for them.

Why is is? Is it just that evolution made use of some bacteria that happened to be toxic for competitive / antibiotic reasons or is it that bacteria are generally better at synthesising complex compounds, or something else?

Even those that apparently synthesis their own may have nicked the genes from bacteria.
http://bioinformatics.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/22/3/264?rss=1

 

[drkitten]

Why is is? Is it just that evolution made use of some bacteria that happened to be toxic for competitive / antibiotic reasons or is it that bacteria are generally better at synthesising complex compounds, or something else?

In general, bacteria are better at chemical manipulation than "higher" life forms, largely because there's simply so many different kinds of bacteria, and one of them is likely to specialize in what you need. Case in point : termites. Although termites "eat" wood, they don't actually digest it -- instead, bacteria in their gut perform the actual chemical breakdown and termites use the bacteria's waste products.

 

[tsg]

It's the micro equivalent of Douglas Adams' theory:

Very few things actually get manufactured these days, because in an infinitely large Universe such as, for instance, the one in which we live, most things one could possibly imagine, and a lot of things one would rather not, grow somewhere. A forest was discovered recently in which most of the trees grew ratchet screwdrivers as fruit. The life cycle of ratchet screwdriver fruit it quite interesting. Once picked it needs a dark dusty drawer in which it can lie undisturbed for years. Then one night it suddenly hatches, discards its outer skin which crumbles into dust, and emerges as a totally unidentifiable little metal object with flanges at both ends and a sort of ridge and a sort of hole for a screw. This, when found, will get thrown away. No one knows what it is supposed to gain from this. Nature, in her infinite wisdom, is presumably working on it.