My naive hypothesis: Once you’re able to launch a projectile at a predator or prey such that it breaks skin or shell, if you want it to die, its vastly cheaper to make venom at the ends of the projectiles than to make the projectiles launch fast enough that there’s a good increase in probability the adversary dies quickly.
My completely naive guess would be that venom is mostly too slow for creatures of this size compared with gross physical damage and blood loss, and that getting close enough to set claws on the target is the hard part anyway. Venom seems more useful as a defensive or retributive mechanism than a hunting one.
My naive hypothesis: Once you’re able to launch a projectile at a predator or prey such that it breaks skin or shell, if you want it to die, its vastly cheaper to make venom at the ends of the projectiles than to make the projectiles launch fast enough that there’s a good increase in probability the adversary dies quickly.
Why don’t lions, tigers, wolves, crocodiles, etc have venom-tipped claws and teeth?
(Actually, apparently many ancestral mammal species like did have venom spurs, similar to the male platypus)
My completely naive guess would be that venom is mostly too slow for creatures of this size compared with gross physical damage and blood loss, and that getting close enough to set claws on the target is the hard part anyway. Venom seems more useful as a defensive or retributive mechanism than a hunting one.