Unexpected uses for venom still doesn't make the animals less terrifyingly bizarre

A slightly oddly-worded article with a few too many typos, but interesting.

What is the most terrifying creature in the darkest corner of your imagination? I tell you now, it may have to go some to beat this beast. It's a disgusting worm-like organism that grabs you with four metal-reinforced jaws. Once latched in place, these lances inject you with a paralysing venom that also liquefies your flesh, which the worm then proceeds to suck up. Nice. Ok, the critter may not be much longer than your little finger, but the close-up image certainly makes the stomach churn.

"If you eat fruit; well, they're pollinated by bees, which are venomous," says Dr Ronald Jenner, the NHM's venom evolution expert. "Figs are pollinated by parasitoid wasps. If you eat squid or octopus - they're venomous. They use venoms in cosmetics - face-masks use a synthetic version of a snake peptide that relaxes the muscles. You may not know this but your diabetes medicine is most likely a synthetic version of a toxin. The red wine you drink has been clarified often with the swim bladders of venomous catfish. They don't put it on the label, but venom's tendrils are in your life... Without venom, we'd be scuppered."

Venom is a toxin - usually a kind of peptide or large protein - that is actively delivered through a wound via a specialised mechanism, involving teeth, fangs, claws, spurs or a stinger. Believe it or not, there's even a newt that does it with its ribs. It breaks them first, pokes them through glands in its skin and then injects its foe.

Which is just absolutely bizarre :
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8212000/8212623.stm
When the newt becomes agitated or perceives a threat, it swings its ribs forward, increasing their angle to the spine by up to 50 degrees. As it does this, the newt keeps the rest of its body still. "The forward movement of the ribs increases the body size and stretches the skin to the point of piercing it," says zoologist Egon Heiss of the University of Vienna in Austria. The tips of the newt's ribs then stick outside its body, like exposed spines.

"When teased or attacked by a predator, [the newt] secretes a poisonous milky substance on to the body surface. The combination of the poisonous secretion and the ribs as 'stinging' tools is highly effective," says Heiss. Surprisingly, the newt, which is related to other newts and salamanders, appears to suffer no major ill effects, despite repeatedly puncturing its own body and exposing its rib bones.

And back to the first article :

Of course, everyone wants to know what is the most lethal member in Ronald's collection. "I always get asked what is the worst of the worst", he says. Comparing venoms is not straightforward because this form of chemical warfare can be highly specialised: what works on one type of prey may be much less effective on another. But the NHM expert clearly has a soft spot for the coastal taipan snake, which is found on the northern coast of Australia and in New Guinea.

In toxinology, researchers use a measure called the "median lethal dose" to describe a venom's power. "If the total yield of the strongest venom ever measured in a taipan was delivered in a full bite - that could kill 50% of 3.3 million mice. That's insane," says Ronald.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41805961