Overview
- Researchers captured more than 100 strikes from 36 venomous species at Venomworld using two 1,000-fps cameras and 3D reconstruction against warmed medical or ballistics gel.
- Vipers usually hit within about 100 milliseconds, with a blunt-nosed viper recorded at roughly 22 milliseconds and accelerations up to 710 m/s².
- Species performance differed: the terciopelo (Bothrops asper) exceeded 4.5 m/s, while the fastest elapid, the rough-scaled death adder, reached about 2.2 m/s.
- Family-specific tactics were documented, with vipers walking hinged fangs into position before injecting, elapids delivering repeated bites to pump venom, and rear-fanged colubrids sawing to create crescent wounds.
- The footage also captured a fang snapping off mid-strike, and authors note the dataset is viper-heavy (31 of 36 species) and call for broader sampling across elapids and colubrids.