Predation, Venom, and Carnivory

"they seem well designed to do what they do, and they do it very efficiently!" — Philip Bell, Creation Ministries International, on viper fangs and venom, 2009¹

Summary

The equipment of killing works. None of it reads as a broken version of something gentler, and the young-earth literature mostly admits this. The claim that predators' weapons were repurposed after the Fall owes an account of what each one did before it. For claws and sharp teeth such an account exists and has evidence. For venom delivery, the cone snail's harpoon and the spitting cobra it does not.

The systems are precise. A cat extends its claws only by contracting two opposing muscle groups at once, and its forelimbs are its main tool for seizing prey.²² A rattlesnake's pit organ is built on a heat sensor that switches on at about 28 °C, nearly ten degrees below the same sensor in a rat snake, which has no pits.³ Vipers adjust their fangs after contact in more than a third of 750 filmed strikes.⁴ A fish-hunting cone snail fires a hollow tooth hydraulically and loads its venom with an insulin shaped like a fish's.⁵⁶
Creationist writers say so themselves. Philip Bell of Creation Ministries International (CMI) calls viper fangs and venom "unlikely" to be "Creation-week designs that have simply degenerated since the Fall."¹ CMI's Creation Answers Book warns that claiming a lost gentle use for every such structure "risks stretching credulity to the limit."⁷
Their answers sort into three piles. Claws and sharp teeth have an evidenced plant-eating use. Pit organs have a proposed use with no evidence. Venom delivery, the cone snail and the spitting cobra have none, and the answer offered is that the genes were hidden until the Curse or were built by mutation after it.
Venom is built from ordinary parts. Bryan Fry counted at least 24 separate recruitments of body-protein families into snake venom.⁸ A later dispute moved the source from body tissues to saliva, but kept gene duplication. The Institute for Creation Research (ICR) reported that dispute as a refutation of duplication. It was not.
Three common claims need correcting. The spitting cobra's aim is defensive and plays no role in catching prey.⁹ The giant panda keeps a carnivore's canines and gut, but its lower carnassial tooth has lost its cutting blade.¹⁰ Predators regulate small prey in the Serengeti, but food, not predators, regulates the wildebeest.¹¹
What holds, measured. The panda lives on bamboo with a meat-eater's digestive genes and a broken meat-taste gene.¹² Mountain lions took prion-infected deer at 3 to 8 times the odds of hunters.¹³ Gazelles held by cheetahs stopped moving after an average of 4.5 minutes, while the prion disease that lions select for kills over 2 weeks to 8 months.¹⁴¹⁵

Verdict. This is the case the degeneration model does not touch. Loss explains why a panda cannot taste meat and a cat cannot live without it; it does not explain the weapons. The honest young-earth answer is CMI's and Bell's: the design was foreknown and switched on at the Curse, or added after it. Biology cannot test that, and its theological cost belongs to Death Before the Fall and to the planned article on the problem of evil.

Part 1: The problem, in its makers' own words

The atheist statement is Richard Dawkins's. In River Out of Eden he wrote that "thousands of animals are being eaten alive" every minute, and that nature shows "nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."¹⁶¹⁶ The sharpest Christian statement is by the theologian Christopher Southgate. He argues that the beauty of a hunting leopard or a stooping peregrine is not separate from the harm it does: "That value, in some cases, specifically attaches to the qualities necessary for the behavior that inflicts suffering on other creatures."¹⁷ Southgate, who accepts the evolutionary timescale, calls this edge "the sharpest edge of the problem."¹⁷

The young-earth answer, in its creationist authors' own words, has two forms. The first is degeneration. Jeffrey Tomkins of ICR describes a model in which "genes and their regulatory sequences have either been corrupted and/or lost through genome degradation."¹⁸ The second is design with foreknowledge. CMI's Creation Answers Book sets out both. Its Position 1 says each structure had a different use before the Fall and reached its present use by degeneration. Its Position 2b says "The design information for DAS was already present before the Fall, perhaps in latent or masked form."⁷ DAS is CMI's term for defence and attack structures.

CMI then argues against its own Position 1. It says the lion appears to be "a highly-designed hunting and killing machine." It asks "Before the Fall, what was the function of the cheetah's blinding speed?" It adds that relying on unknown pre-Fall uses for "each and every one of the millions of DAS" risks "stretching credulity to the limit."⁷⁷⁷ It also sees the cost of the alternative: if these structures "arose by chance mutations," the argument from design is weakened.⁷

So the test is the one the parent article sets for every repurposing claim: evidence connecting an older use to the present one.

Part 2: The equipment, measured

Claws and carnassials

William Gonyea and Ronald Ashworth dissected the retractile claws of cats in 1975. They found that "the primary organ of prehension used in capturing prey" is the clawed forelimb. Elastic ligaments hold the claws back, and "co-contraction of both forearm flexor and extensor muscles is necessary to produce claw protrusion."²²

Dwight Davis's 1964 monograph describes the carnivore's teeth as two tools: "the enlarged dagger-like canines anteriorly, and the enlarged scissor-like carnassials." He calls these "the key adaptation of the Carnivora."¹⁰ Per Christiansen's 2008 study of cat skulls describes the cats as "the most anatomically derived of all carnivores for predation on large prey with a precision killing bite."¹⁹ In 21 cheetah kills that George Schaller watched in the Serengeti, 20 used a throat hold.¹⁴

Heat pits and hinged fangs

Elena Gracheva and colleagues found the pit viper's heat sensor in 2010. It is TRPA1, an ion channel that in other vertebrates works mainly as a detector of irritant chemicals.³ In the rattlesnake it responds to heat "with a threshold of 27.6 ± 0.9°C (Q10 = 13.7)."³ The same channel in a rat snake, which has no pits, has "a higher threshold of 37.2 ± 0.7°C."³ A thin membrane in each pit acts as "an infrared antenna," and vipers "can detect prey at distances up to 1 meter."³

The pit is not only for hunting. Aaron Krochmal and George Bakken blocked the pits of western diamondback rattlesnakes and found the snakes could choose a cool retreat by radiant heat only while the pits worked.²⁰ In 2004 they tested 12 pitviper species and one true viper: "All pitviper species were able to rely on their facial pits to direct thermoregulatory movements, while the true viper was unable to do so."²¹

David Cundall filmed more than 750 strikes by 86 viper species. He describes the fangs as "extremely long, rotating, hollow teeth." In more than a third of strikes the snake repositioned its fangs after first contact, which implies fine sensing of how deep a fang has gone.⁴

The cone snail's harpoon and insulin

A fish-hunting cone snail "uses a high-speed hydraulic mechanism to inject its hollow, spear-like radular tooth into prey."⁵ The radula is the toothed feeding ribbon that ordinary snails use to scrape food. In the cone snail a single tooth has become a hypodermic needle.

In 2015 Helena Safavi-Hemami and colleagues found an insulin, Con-Ins G1, among the most highly expressed genes of the venom gland of Conus geographus. It "is more similar to fish insulins than to any other vertebrate insulin."⁶ In zebrafish first made diabetic, a dose of 65 nanograms per gram "significantly lowered blood glucose to 74.0 ± 8.051 mg/dL," close to their normal level. Added to the water, it reduced the swimming of week-old larval fish.⁶ The authors conclude that these snails "use specialized insulins to elicit hypoglycemic shock."⁶ That last step is their inference from the swimming test. They did not measure blood sugar crashing below normal in a healthy fish. The insulin appears only in species that engulf fish with a net-like mouth, not in those that harpoon them.⁶

The same snail carries a second venom. Sébastien Dutertre and colleagues showed that cone snails "can rapidly switch between distinct venoms in response to predatory or defensive stimuli," and that the defensive venom is the one whose paralytic toxins are "consistent with its lethal effects on humans."²²

The spitting cobra's aim

Guido Westhoff and colleagues filmed spitting cobras aiming at a moving target. The snakes "can accurately track the movements of a potentially threatening vertebrate," and aim ahead of where its eyes will be. They release venom in about 50 milliseconds, and an earlier study recorded about 90% accuracy.²³²³

Spitting is not killing equipment. Taline Kazandjian and colleagues showed in 2021 that spitting "plays no role in prey capture" and "is the only long-distance, injurious defensive adaptation among almost four thousand species of snakes."⁹ Three cobra lineages evolved it separately. Each boosted a toxin that increases pain, and the venoms of spitters were no more lethal to mice than those of cobras that do not spit.⁹ The authors propose early humans as the threat that selected for it.⁹ The aim is precise equipment for causing pain in an attacker's eye.

Part 3: Where venom comes from

Fry's 2005 survey traced snake toxins to twenty ordinary protein families, among them acetylcholinesterase and ADAM metalloproteinases. "Toxin recruitment events were found to have occurred at least 24 times in the evolution of snake venom." He added that "All of the snake toxin types still possess the bioactivity of the ancestral proteins in at least some of the toxin isoforms."⁸⁸

The source tissue was then disputed. Nicholas Casewell and colleagues found body proteins nested inside toxin families in 2012. They read it as "reverse recruitment of toxins back to physiological roles," and concluded that recruitment "is not a one-way process."²⁴ Adam Hargreaves and colleagues answered in 2014. Many "venom" genes are also active in the salivary glands of harmless reptiles. They were "restricted to the venom gland following duplication, not recruited," so "snake venom evolves through the duplication and subfunctionalization of genes encoding existing salivary proteins."²⁵ Jacobo Reyes-Velasco and colleagues found python versions of venom genes active in many tissues, and that "the expansion of venom gene families is largely restricted to highly venomous caenophidian snakes."²⁶ The dispute is over which tissue supplied the genes. All three papers keep duplication.

The best-traced case is a snake metalloproteinase. Matt Giorgianni and colleagues showed that it "massively expanded from a single, deeply conserved adam28 disintegrin and metalloproteinase gene, to as many as 31 tandem genes" in the western diamondback rattlesnake.²⁷ Agneesh Barua and Alexander Mikheyev found that venom glands run on a network of about 3,000 housekeeping genes, and that "the network is conserved between venom glands of snakes and salivary glands of mammals." Venomous lizards, shrews and the solenodon each evolved venom by overproducing kallikreins, enzymes "common in ancestral saliva."²⁸ Platypus venom came from "gene duplication and subsequent functional diversification of beta-defensins," which are antimicrobial proteins.²⁹ Duplication is not the only route. In parasitoid wasps a common path is "co-option of single-copy genes from non-venom progenitors."³⁰

Two things follow. First, the molecules had ordinary uses: digestion, blood-vessel control, fighting microbes. That fits a created world in which the same proteins did good work. Jerry Bergman made this point for toxins generally in 1997: "all compounds are toxic in high enough levels."³¹ Second, the step from saliva to venom is a gain, not a loss. A single gene becoming 31, a gland making a toxin in bulk, and a hollow fang to deliver it are additions.

ICR's Tomkins reported Hargreaves 2014 as showing that "venom genes are not the products of alleged evolutionary processes."¹⁸ He quoted Hargreaves's sentence rejecting recruitment from body genes, and left out its conclusion that venom evolves "through the duplication and subfunctionalization" of salivary genes.²⁵ Answers in Genesis (AiG) now takes the opposite view from Tomkins. Its 2026 article by Harry Sanders accepts that "mutations could have occurred that turned harmless digestive enzymes into venomous killers." It adds that "Prior to the fall, gene duplications like these would not have existed, and these snakes would have had no venom."³² That is a model of fast, constructive change after the Fall, not of decay.

Part 4: The young-earth answers, sorted

The pre-Fall uses proposed in AiG, CMI, ICR and Creation Research Society Quarterly (CRSQ) sources fall into three piles.

System	Pre-Fall use proposed, and by whom	Evidence for that use	Pile
Claws	Climbing, digging, display (CMI 2026); not used for meat until the Fall (Stambaugh 1991)	Plant-eating therizinosaur dinosaurs had huge hooked claws (Lautenschlager 2014)	Evidenced
Sharp canines	Gripping fruit and tearing plants (Stambaugh 1991, CMI 2019, Sanders 2026)	Fruit bats use canines to pluck large fruit (Freeman 1988)	Evidenced
Carnassial shear	None named	The plant-eating panda has lost it (Davis 1964)	None
Pit organ	Smelling (Thomas 2010, "quite speculative")	None for smell. Heat-guided cooling is measured in 12 species (Krochmal 2004), but no creationist source found cites it	Proposal without evidence
Fangs and venom	Fruit-softening, raised and rejected by CMI 2019. Otherwise no use: switched off until the Curse (Bell 2009, CMI 2019, Hennigan 2010), or grown after it from tooth grooves and salivary genes (CMI 2024 update, Sanders 2026)	None	None
Cone snail harpoon and insulin	None found	None	None
Spitting	None found; the behaviour is defensive	None	None
Stonefish spines, cheetah speed	Sanders and CMI ask and give none	None	None

Claws and teeth have an evidenced gentle use. James Stambaugh proposed in 1991 that "God created razor-sharp claws and teeth that can cut flesh. Yet the animals did not use them for carnivory until after the fall of Adam."³³ CMI's 2026 article says "Sharp teeth can grip fruit or tear tough plant matter, and claws can dig, climb, or display strength during mating contests."³⁴ The evidence is real. Therizinosaurs were "herbivorous theropod dinosaurs" with "iconically large and elongate manual claws," and some used them "as grasping hooks during foraging."³⁵ Patricia Freeman's study of bat skulls found that plucking and carrying large fruit "may require the same canine adaptations as those that eat struggling animals."³⁶

The evidence has limits. Freeman also found that the specialist fruit bats have smaller canines than meat-eaters, 14% of the toothrow against 19.2%, and "molars with a distinctive labial rim."³⁶ Her sample was New World bats, not the Old World fruit bats creationists usually mean. A therizinosaur claw is not a cat's claw with its spring-loaded retraction. So the pile shows that a claw or a fang can serve a plant-eater. It does not show that a cat's paw was built for one.

Pit organs have a proposed use, and a better one unused. Brian Thomas of ICR wrote that pits "could have been used as specialized odor-detecting organs," and called the idea "quite speculative."³⁷ No evidence was offered. Krochmal's measured thermoregulation is a use that needs no prey at all, and no creationist source found cites it.

Venom has no proposed use that anyone defends. CMI raised the idea that fangs once injected "a fruit-softening substance" and rejected it, since venom "appears to be designed for purposes far removed from fruit eating."⁷ Sanders at AiG writes that "Snake venom, too, with its dual attack and defensive nature, seems difficult to envision in a perfect world."³² The answer offered instead is foreknowledge. Bell suggests "the genetic information for these rather macabre features (including toxic venom) was created originally, but only switched on as part of the Curse," and calls it "informed speculation."¹ Tom Hennigan's CRSQ paper on bears calls them "designed by God to operate in a cursed world," and proposes that "latent and directed mutations" may explain "the origins of carnivory."³⁸³⁸ CMI's 2024 update to Bell's article adds that almost all snakes have tiny grooves at the base of their teeth, and treats deepening them into venom channels as within "the bounds of the creation model where creatures were designed to vary."¹ That is the fang's version of the saliva answer: an ordinary part, enlarged. It still names no use for the finished fang before the Fall. CMI itself objects that "it is not easy to imagine genetically how such self-activation could take place for such a vast number of creatures."⁷ Bergman's CRSQ paper on snakes argues the venom apparatus is "a complex unit with many irreducible parts."³⁹ That is a design argument. It may count against a naturalistic origin, but it makes the design problem sharper, not smaller.

The cone snail and the spitting cobra have nothing. No AiG, CMI, ICR or CRSQ source found discusses the cone snail's harpoon or its insulin. Bergman's argument that toxicity is a matter of dose fits the molecule, which is an insulin. It does not reach the hollow tooth that injects it. The cobra's spitting is aimed defence, and a defence presupposes an attacker.

Part 5: What holds, measured

Carnivores can live on plants. Huabin Zhao and colleagues note that "the giant panda is a vegetarian with 99% of its diet being bamboo." Its umami taste-receptor gene, Tas1r1, is broken, while "the open reading frame (ORF) of Tas1r1 is intact in all these carnivores except the giant panda."¹² Its genome "probably has all the necessary components for a carnivorous digestive system" and no cellulase genes.⁴⁰ It digests "less than 20% of digestible dry matter" and eats up to 45 kg of bamboo a day.⁴¹ This supports the claim that a meat-eater's body can run on plants.

Two cautions go with it. The panda's gene loss runs from meat-eating to plant-eating, the opposite of the change the young-earth model needs after the Fall. And Davis found the panda's carnassials changed: its lower carnassial "has lost its sectorial character," much like the same tooth in ordinary bears and raccoons.¹⁰ The panda keeps a carnivore's canines and gut, not its full dentition.

Loss does explain one thing about carnivores: their dependence on meat. Cats have a broken sweet-taste gene, a 247-base-pair deletion shared by tigers and cheetahs.⁴² Cats "have a very limited ability to synthesize taurine and arginine" and must eat some animal food or synthetic supplements.⁴³ A loss can lock an animal into meat. It cannot build the claw that catches it.

Predators take the sick and the old, mostly. Caroline Krumm and colleagues compared deer killed by mountain lions with deer shot by hunters nearby. Lion-killed females were infected with chronic wasting disease at odds 8.5 times higher, and males 3.2 times higher.¹³ On Isle Royale, "Wolves showed strong selection for senescent moose."⁴⁴ Trained falcons released at a Spanish refuse tip took more juvenile, sick and poorly muscled gulls than random shooting did.⁴⁵ The selection is real but partial. Of the 54 lion-killed deer, 42 were not infected, and prime-aged adults made up 42.9% of the moose that wolves killed.⁴⁴

Predators regulate small prey, not large. Forty years of Serengeti data show a threshold near 150 kg. Below it ungulates "experience strong predation pressure." Above it they "have few natural predators and exhibit food limitation."⁴⁶ For wildebeest, "The main cause of mortality (75% of cases) was undernutrition," and "Predation played only a minor role in limiting the wildebeest population."¹¹ CMI itself says the regulation argument "says nothing about what God originally intended."³⁴

Death by predator is usually faster. Schaller timed cheetah kills at "An average of 4.5 minutes (2 to 11)."¹⁴ Lions held a throat for up to "8, 10, and 13 minutes."¹⁴ Hans Kruuk timed spotted hyenas at "anything from 1 to 13 min (average 6.3 min)."⁴⁷ The alternatives are slower. Chronic wasting disease kills "in 2 weeks to 8 months" after signs appear.¹⁵ Marrow fat is "the last adipose tissue to be mobilized during starvation," so a starved wildebeest with depleted marrow has used up every other reserve first.⁴⁸ No study found measures how many days that takes.

Faster is not gentle. Hyenas and wild dogs "killed the victim by eating it."⁴⁷ With lions, "the animal may die from loss of its blood and viscera rather than from strangulation."¹⁴ Southgate notes that a leopard "may then take several minutes to dispatch a full-grown antelope."¹⁷ The clock favours predation. The manner often does not.

Objections and responses

"Not knowing a pre-Fall use does not mean there was none." True, and CMI says so. It also says that leaning on it for millions of structures "risks stretching credulity to the limit."⁷ The pit organ shows the argument can be made honestly: a non-predatory use was found by experiment. An unknown use can become a known one only by measurement.

"Venom is just saliva gone wrong." The molecules came from saliva and body proteins. The system did not come from losing anything. A gene copied 31 times, a gland restricted to making it, and a rotating hollow fang are additions.⁴²⁷ AiG's own 2026 answer is post-Fall duplication, not decay.³²

"God foreknew the Fall and built the weapons in, switched off." That is CMI's Position 2b and Bell's view, and it is coherent. No one has proposed a biological test for it, and CMI itself finds the genetics hard to imagine. It also concedes the point this article makes, that the equipment was designed for killing. Whether that is compatible with a "very good" creation is the question Death Before the Fall takes up.

"There are vegetarian lions." Stambaugh cites a lion that "could not be trained to eat meat," and Sanders a lioness "preferring grains and milk."³³³² Milk is an animal food, and cats need taurine found only in animal products or supplements.⁴³ A cat that survives on a supplemented diet does not show the diet cats were built for.

From the skeptic: "Predation is nature's mercy." The measured times support "usually faster than disease." Kruuk's hyenas and Schaller's lions show it is not painless.

Issues and unanswered questions

No young-earth source found gives a pre-Fall use for a venom delivery system. The fang, the gland, the cone snail's harpoon and the cobra's spitting are all unanswered. The single named proposal for pits, smell, is marked speculative by its own author.
Latent information has no mechanism. CMI names the genetic difficulty and does not solve it. A test would need a venom gene set present but silent in a lineage that is not venomous today.
Post-Fall duplication has not been priced. If venom families such as the rattlesnake's 31 metalloproteinase copies were built after the Fall, that construction must fit a few thousand years. No creationist source found has done that count.
Venom and predation are in the fossil record. Death Before the Fall lists a venom groove in the therapsid Euchambersia and bone-filled tyrannosaur dung. On the young-earth reading these are post-Fall and mostly Flood-year.
Several sources were read as abstracts only: Gonyea 1975, Krochmal 2003 and 2004, Salisbury 2010, Cundall 2009, Martinson 2017, Mduma 1999, Sinclair 2003 and Williams 1980. Their numbers are the authors' own summaries.
Freeman's bat sample omits the Old World fruit bats. Zhao's 4.2-million-year date for the panda's gene loss is conventional. The young-earth side rejects the date, not the loss.

Verdict

The equipment of killing is working equipment, and the degeneration model does not reach it. Loss explains why a panda cannot taste meat and why a cat cannot live without it. Nothing measured shows a claw, pit, fang, harpoon or spitting nozzle to be a damaged form of something gentler. For claws and sharp teeth the young-earth side has a real, evidenced gentle use. For the pit organ, secular experiments supply the non-predatory use its creationist critics never cited. For venom, the harpoon and the spitting cobra, the best creationist writers, Bell, CMI and Sanders, do not claim a pre-Fall use. They say the design was foreknown or built after the Curse.

What holds is real: carnivores can live on plants, venom is made from ordinary proteins, predators take a disproportionate share of the sick, and they kill in minutes where disease takes months. None of it answers the question the catalogue asks. The honest young-earth answer here is theological, and it is priced in Death Before the Fall.

Sources

1.
Bell, Philip. “Snakes: designed to kill?” Creation 31(4):47. Sep 2009. Creation Ministries International's magazine; web version posted 31 October 2010 and updated 22 April 2024. Read from the downloaded page; located by paragraph. Copyright.
1. 1a.
  Section A pre-Fall purpose?, third paragraph: “The sophisticated hollow fangs and venom of certain snakes make it unlikely that they are Creation-week designs that have simply degenerated since the Fall—they seem well designed to do what they do, and they do it very efficiently!” ↩ ↩
2. 1b.
  Section A pre-Fall purpose?, third paragraph: “Alternatively, since God foreknew the Fall of humankind (Genesis 3), perhaps the genetic information for these rather macabre features (including toxic venom) was created originally, but only switched on as part of the Curse”. Section A pre-Fall purpose?, fourth paragraph: “This is informed speculation though, because the scriptural record is silent on these matters.” ↩
3. 1c.
  Section Update: 22 April 2024: “Since this article was published, scientists have discovered that almost all species of snakes have tiny indentations at the base of their teeth called plicidentine.” “The deepening of grooves within a snake’s fangs is conceivably within the bounds of the creation model where creatures were designed to vary.” ↩
2.
Gonyea, William, and Ronald Ashworth. “The form and function of retractile claws in the Felidae and other representative carnivorans.” Journal of Morphology 145(2):229–238. 1975. Abstract only, read from PubMed (PMID 1127699). Copyright.
1. 2a.
  Section Abstract: “Recent behavioral studies have shown the primary organ of prehension used in capturing prey to be the claw equipped forelimbs.” ↩ ↩
2. 2b.
  Section Abstract: “Claw retraction, however, is a function of the dorsal elastic ligaments and not of the forearm extensor muscles. The resistance provided by these ligaments allows for flexion of the wrist and digital joints without claw protrusion. Moreover, co-contraction of both forearm flexor and extensor muscles is necessary to produce claw protrusion.” ↩ ↩
3.
Gracheva, Elena O. et al. “Molecular basis of infrared detection by snakes.” Nature 464(7291):1006–1011. 2010. Read from the PMC author manuscript, which carries no page numbers; located by section. Copyright. Mirror: PMC
1. 3a.
  Section Introduction, first two paragraphs: “Biophysical studies suggest that this system is exquisitely sensitive, such that vipers can detect prey at distances up to 1 meter.” “Suspended within each of these hollow chambers is a thin membrane that serves as an infrared antenna”. ↩
2. 3b.
  Section Snake TRPA1 is a heat-activated channel: “rattlesnake TRPA1 showed extremely robust and steep responses to heat with a threshold of 27.6 ± 0.9°C (Q10 = 13.7)”. ↩ ↩
3. 3c.
  Section Snake TRPA1 is a heat-activated channel: “whereas the rat snake channel responded with a higher threshold of 37.2 ± 0.7°C (Q10 = 8.8)”. ↩
4. 3d.
  Section Discussion, first paragraph: “previously identified vertebrate TRPA1 orthologues function primarily as detectors of chemical irritants”. ↩
4.
Cundall, David. “Viper fangs: functional limitations of extreme teeth.” Physiological and Biochemical Zoology 82(1):63–79. 2009. Abstract only, read from PubMed (PMID 19025501). Copyright.
1. 4a.
  Section Abstract: “The fangs of vipers are extremely long, rotating, hollow teeth. Analysis of video records of more than 750 strikes recorded at 60 or 250 frames per second for 285 individuals representing 86 species in 31 genera shows that vipers reposition fangs after initial contact with prey in more than a third of the strikes.” ↩ ↩ ↩
5.
Salisbury, Sean M. et al. “Venom kinematics during prey capture in Conus: the biomechanics of a rapid injection system.” Journal of Experimental Biology 213(5):673–682. 2010. Abstract only, read from PubMed (PMID 20154182); the publisher's PDF refused automated download. Copyright.
1. 5a.
  Section Abstract: “Conus catus, a fish-hunting species, uses a high-speed hydraulic mechanism to inject its hollow, spear-like radular tooth into prey.” ↩ ↩
6.
Safavi-Hemami, Helena et al. “Specialized insulin is used for chemical warfare by fish-hunting cone snails.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112(6):1743–1748. 2015. Read from the PMC HTML; located by section. Copyright. Mirror: PMC
1. 6a.
  Section Significance: “Venomous cone snails use specialized insulins to elicit hypoglycemic shock, facilitating capture of their fish prey.” ↩
2. 6b.
  Section Results: “Thus, Con-Ins G1 is more similar to fish insulins than to any other vertebrate insulin.” ↩ ↩
3. 6c.
  Section Results: “Administration of sCon-Ins G1 at 65 ng peptide/g body weight significantly lowered blood glucose to 74.0 ± 8.051 mg/dL ( n = 8, P < 0.01).” “the spontaneous swimming behavior of fish larvae (7 d after fertilization, n = 3) was monitored before (baseline) and following application of 25 nmol/mL peptide.” The fish were first made hyperglycemic, from 65.9 to 273.0 mg/dL; 74.0 is a return to about normal, not a fall below it. ↩
4. 6d.
  Section Discussion: “specialized insulins that are venom components in these fish-hunting species are absent in venoms of other fish hunters that do not use a net strategy, but instead harpoon their prey.” ↩
7.
Creation Ministries International. “How did bad things come about?” The Creation Answers Book, chapter 6. 8th edition. 2019. Unsigned chapter posted online on 22 March 2022. DAS is the book's abbreviation for defence and attack structures. Read from the downloaded page; located by section heading. Copyright.
1. 7a.
  Section Position No. 2b: “The design information for DAS was already present before the Fall, perhaps in latent or masked form.” ↩
2. 7b.
  Section Position No. 2b: “However, it is not easy to imagine genetically how such self-activation could take place for such a vast number of creatures”. ↩
3. 7c.
  Section Position No. 1: “All this makes it overwhelmingly appear to be a highly-designed hunting and killing machine.” ↩
4. 7d.
  Section Position No. 1: “Before the Fall, what was the function of the cheetah's blinding speed?” ↩
5. 7e.
  Section Position No. 1: “It may be argued that our ignorance of the pre-Fall function does not mean that there wasn't one. This is true, of course, but if used for each and every one of the millions of DAS, it risks stretching credulity to the limit.” ↩ ↩ ↩
6. 7f.
  Section Position No. 1: “If we say that DAS, or at least some aspects of their present function, arose by chance mutations, then we may have seriously undermined the main argument from design.” ↩
7. 7g.
  Section Position No. 1: “The idea that the snake's fangs may have been used to inject a fruit-softening substance pre-Fall has the same problem.” Section Position No. 1, following paragraph: “In any case, snake venom contains complex chemicals that appear to be designed for purposes far removed from fruit eating.” ↩
8.
Fry, Bryan G. “From genome to “venome”: Molecular origin and evolution of the snake venom proteome inferred from phylogenetic analysis of toxin sequences and related body proteins.” Genome Research 15(3):403–420. 2005. Read from the PMC HTML. The abstract lists twenty protein families. Mirror: PMC
1. 8a.
  Page 403, abstract: “Toxin recruitment events were found to have occurred at least 24 times in the evolution of snake venom.” ↩ ↩
2. 8b.
  Page 403, abstract: “All of the snake toxin types still possess the bioactivity of the ancestral proteins in at least some of the toxin isoforms.” ↩
9.
Kazandjian, Taline D. et al. “Convergent evolution of pain-inducing defensive venom components in spitting cobras.” Science 371(6527):386–390. 2021. Read from the PMC accepted manuscript; located by section. Copyright. Mirror: PMC
1. 9a.
  Section Introduction, third paragraph: “this behavior plays no role in prey capture, targets specific sensory tissues, and is the only long-distance, injurious defensive adaptation among almost four thousand species of snakes.” ↩ ↩
2. 9b.
  Section Abstract: “three lineages of cobras have independently evolved the ability to spit venom at adversaries”. Section Results: “we tested our venoms in murine lethality assays (Table S5) and found no significant differences between spitting and non-spitting species”. ↩
3. 9c.
  Section Discussion: “We believe several considerations make ancient hominins a plausible and compelling candidate for favoring repeated evolution of spitting in the Afro-Asian cobras”. ↩
10.
Davis, D. Dwight. “The Giant Panda: A Morphological Study of Evolutionary Mechanisms.” Fieldiana: Zoology Memoirs 3. Chicago Natural History Museum. 1964. Public domain. PDF page = printed page + 12, checked on PDF pages 79, 137 and 139 against their printed folios.
1. 10a.
  Page 66: “Two areas dominate the dental battery: the enlarged dagger-like canines anteriorly, and the enlarged scissor-like carnassials … posteriorly.” “These two specialized areas of the dentition are the key adaptation of the Carnivora.” Of generalized carnivores. Read from the OCR text, which garbles the superscript tooth numbers omitted here. ↩
2. 10b.
  Page 127: “the lower carnassial, has lost its sectorial character and is quite similar to the corresponding tooth in both Ursus and Procyon.” ↩ ↩
11.
Mduma, Simon A. R. et al. “Food regulates the Serengeti wildebeest: a 40-year record.” Journal of Animal Ecology 68(6):1101–1122. 1999. Abstract only, from the OpenAlex abstract index. Copyright.
1. 11a.
  Section Summary, point 5: “The main cause of mortality (75% of cases) was undernutrition. Bone marrow condition showed that more animals died in extremely poor condition as the population increased and predators did not cause these deaths.” Section Summary, point 6: “Predation played only a minor role in limiting the wildebeest population.” ↩ ↩
12.
Zhao, Huabin et al. “Pseudogenization of the umami taste receptor gene Tas1r1 in the giant panda coincided with its dietary switch to bamboo.” Molecular Biology and Evolution 27(12):2669–2673. 2010. Read from the PMC HTML. The 4.2-million-year date for the loss is conventional. Copyright. Mirror: PMC
1. 12a.
  Section Abstract: “Although it belongs to the order Carnivora, the giant panda is a vegetarian with 99% of its diet being bamboo.” “We found that the open reading frame (ORF) of Tas1r1 is intact in all these carnivores except the giant panda.” ↩ ↩
13.
Krumm, Caroline E. et al. “Mountain lions prey selectively on prion-infected mule deer.” Biology Letters 6(2):209–211. 2010. Read from the PMC HTML. CC BY. Mirror: PMC
1. 13a.
  Section Abstract: “both female (OR = 8.5, 95% CI = 2.3–30.9) and male deer (OR = 3.2, 95% CI = 1–10) killed by a mountain lion were more likely to be infected than same-sex deer killed in the vicinity by a hunter”. Table 1: Lion-killed adults infected: 7 of 37 females and 5 of 17 males, so 12 of 54; 42 were not infected. ↩ ↩
14.
Schaller, George B. The Serengeti Lion: A Study of Predator-Prey Relations. University of Chicago Press. 1972. Read on archive.org item serengetilionstu0000scha by search-inside, not borrowed or stored. The item's page map puts plates in the book, so leaf = page + 38 from leaf 98 on. Anchored on the contents, which put Killing at p. 263 and Behavior at the Kill at p. 267, and on the chapter heading 10 The Cheetah at leaf 333 = p. 295.
1. 14a.
  Page 265: “the throat is unprotected, and a lion may grasp it for as long as 8, 10, and 13 minutes to mention the three longest periods noted, until prey ceases to move”. ↩
2. 14b.
  Page 266: “While one lion grasps the throat, others usually begin to eat, and the animal may die from loss of its blood and viscera rather than from strangulation or suffocation.” ↩
3. 14c.
  Page 319: “In 21 detailed killings observed, 20 were with a throat hold”. “death in most instances seemed to be due to strangulation. An average of 4.5 minutes (2 to 11) elapsed before the gazelle ceased to move.” ↩ ↩ ↩
15.
Williams, Elizabeth S., and Stuart Young. “Chronic wasting disease of captive mule deer: a spongiform encephalopathy.” Journal of Wildlife Diseases 16(1):89–98. 1980. Abstract only, read from PubMed (PMID 7373730). 53 captive mule deer and one black-tailed deer, 1967–79.
1. 15a.
  Section Abstract: “Clinical signs were seen in adult deer and included behavioral alterations, progressive weight loss and death in 2 weeks to 8 months.” ↩ ↩
16.
Dawkins, Richard. River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life. BasicBooks. 1995. Chapter 4, God's Utility Function. Read on archive.org item riveroutofedenda0000dawk_m9g4 by search-inside, not borrowed or stored. Leaf = page + 20, anchored on the openings of chapter 1 (leaf 21 = p. 1) and chapter 4 (leaf 115 = p. 95).
1. 16a.
  Pages 131–132: “The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive”. ↩
2. 16b.
  Page 133: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” ↩
17.
Southgate, Christopher. The Groaning of Creation: God, Evolution, and the Problem of Evil. Westminster John Knox. 2008. Read on archive.org item groaningofcreati0000sout by search-inside, not borrowed or stored. Page = leaf − 14, uniform across the item's page map.
1. 17a.
  Page 9: “The more I think through this issue, the more I see that this teleological aspect of evolutionary theodicy is the sharpest edge of the problem.” ↩
2. 17b.
  Page 9: “That value, in some cases, specifically attaches to the qualities necessary for the behavior that inflicts suffering on other creatures.” ↩
3. 17c.
  Page 9: “The leopard moves silently to within killing distance, but may then take several minutes to dispatch a full-grown antelope.” ↩
18.
Tomkins, Jeffrey P. “Unlocking the Origins of Snake Venom.” Institute for Creation Research, Creation Science Update. Dec 15, 2014. Read from the downloaded page. Copyright.
1. 18a.
  Paragraph 1: “In this model, genes and their regulatory sequences have either been corrupted and/or lost through genome degradation to bring about scenarios in nature that seem to defy the original harmonious purpose of God's creation.” ↩
2. 18b.
  Paragraph 3: “The significance of this finding indicates that venom genes are not the products of alleged evolutionary processes, but are important DNA sequences that also serve other purposes in a variety of reptile tissues.” ↩
19.
Christiansen, Per. “Evolution of Skull and Mandible Shape in Cats (Carnivora: Felidae).” PLoS ONE 3(7):e2807. 2008. Read from the PMC HTML. CC BY.
1. 19a.
  Section Abstract: “The felid family consists of two major subgroups, the sabretoothed and the feline cats, to which all extant species belong, and are the most anatomically derived of all carnivores for predation on large prey with a precision killing bite.” ↩
20.
Krochmal, Aaron R., and George S. Bakken. “Thermoregulation is the pits: use of thermal radiation for retreat site selection by rattlesnakes.” Journal of Experimental Biology 206(15):2539–2545. 2003. Abstract only, reconstructed from the OpenAlex abstract index; the publisher's page refused automated download. Copyright.
1. 20a.
  Section Abstract: “We found that western diamondback rattlesnakes could base thermoregulatory decisions on thermal radiation cues when their pits were functional, but not when blocked.” ↩
21.
Krochmal, Aaron R. et al. “Heat in evolution's kitchen: evolutionary perspectives on the functions and origin of the facial pit of pitvipers (Viperidae: Crotalinae).” Journal of Experimental Biology 207(24):4231–4238. 2004. Abstract only, reconstructed from the OpenAlex abstract index. Copyright.
1. 21a.
  Section Abstract: “All pitviper species were able to rely on their facial pits to direct thermoregulatory movements, while the true viper was unable to do so.” ↩
22.
Dutertre, Sébastien et al. “Evolution of separate predation- and defence-evoked venoms in carnivorous cone snails.” Nature Communications 5:3521. 2014. Read from the publisher's HTML. Mirror: PMC
1. 22a.
  Section Abstract: “Remarkably, cone snails can rapidly switch between distinct venoms in response to predatory or defensive stimuli. Here, we show that the defence-evoked venom of Conus geographus contains high levels of paralytic toxins that potently block neuromuscular receptors, consistent with its lethal effects on humans.” ↩
23.
Westhoff, Guido et al. “Target tracking during venom 'spitting' by cobras.” Journal of Experimental Biology 213(11):1797–1802. 2010. Read from the PMC HTML. Copyright. Mirror: PMC
1. 23a.
  Section Abstract: “the target is moving, is frequently >1 m away from the snake and the venom stream is released in approximately 50 ms. In the present study we show that spitting cobras can accurately track the movements of a potentially threatening vertebrate, and by anticipating its subsequent (short-term) movements direct their venom to maximize the likelihood of striking the target's eye.” ↩
2. 23b.
  Section Discussion: “Westhoff et al. reported that spitting cobras had an accuracy of approximately 90% for a single spit (Westhoff et al., 2005)”. ↩
24.
Casewell, Nicholas R. et al. “Dynamic evolution of venom proteins in squamate reptiles.” Nature Communications 3:1066. 2012. Read from the publisher's HTML.
1. 24a.
  Section Abstract: “Phylogenetic and ancestral-state analyses revealed frequent nesting of 'physiological' proteins within venom toxin clades, suggesting early ancestral recruitment into venom followed by reverse recruitment of toxins back to physiological roles. These results provide evidence that protein recruitment into venoms from physiological functions is not a one-way process, but dynamic, with reversal of function and/or co-expression of toxins in different tissues.” ↩
25.
Hargreaves, Adam D. et al. “Restriction and recruitment—gene duplication and the origin and evolution of snake venom toxins.” Genome Biology and Evolution 6(8):2088–2095. 2014. Read from the PMC HTML. Mirror: PMC
1. 25a.
  Section Abstract: “Our comparative transcriptomic analysis of these data reveals that snake venom does not evolve through the hypothesized process of duplication and recruitment of genes encoding body proteins.” Section Abstract, closing sentences: “these genes have therefore been restricted to the venom gland following duplication, not recruited. Thus, snake venom evolves through the duplication and subfunctionalization of genes encoding existing salivary proteins.” ↩ ↩
26.
Reyes-Velasco, Jacobo et al. “Expression of Venom Gene Homologs in Diverse Python Tissues Suggests a New Model for the Evolution of Snake Venom.” Molecular Biology and Evolution 32(1):173–183. 2015. Published online 2014. Abstract only, from the OpenAlex abstract index. Copyright.
1. 26a.
  Section Abstract: “We found that venom gene homologs in the python are expressed in many different tissues outside of oral glands”. “the expansion of venom gene families is largely restricted to highly venomous caenophidian snakes.” ↩
27.
Giorgianni, Matt W. et al. “The origin and diversification of a novel protein family in venomous snakes.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117(20):10911–10920. 2020. Read from the PMC HTML. CC BY-NC-ND. Mirror: PMC
1. 27a.
  Section Abstract: “the SVMP family massively expanded from a single, deeply conserved adam28 disintegrin and metalloproteinase gene, to as many as 31 tandem genes in the Western Diamondback rattlesnake (Crotalus atrox) through a number of single gene and multigene duplication events.” ↩ ↩
28.
Barua, Agneesh, and Alexander S. Mikheyev. “An ancient, conserved gene regulatory network led to the rise of oral venom systems.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118(14):e2021311118. 2021. Read from the PMC HTML; located by section. CC BY-NC-ND. Mirror: PMC
1. 28a.
  Section Abstract: “a network of ∼3,000 nonsecreted housekeeping genes that are strongly coexpressed with the toxins”. Section Significance: “Comparative transcriptomics revealed that the network is conserved between venom glands of snakes and salivary glands of mammals.” Section Abstract: “Heloderma lizards, shrews, and solenodon, evolved venoms in parallel by overexpression of kallikreins, which were common in ancestral saliva and induce vasodilation when injected, causing circulatory shock.” ↩
29.
Whittington, Camilla M. et al. “Defensins and the convergent evolution of platypus and reptile venom genes.” Genome Research 18(6):986–994. 2008. Read from the PMC HTML. Mirror: PMC
1. 29a.
  Section Abstract: “We show that gene duplication and subsequent functional diversification of beta-defensins gave rise to these platypus OvDLPs.” ↩
30.
Martinson, Ellen O. et al. “The Evolution of Venom by Co-option of Single-Copy Genes.” Current Biology 27(13):2007–2013.e8. 2017. Abstract only, from the Europe PMC record. Copyright.
1. 30a.
  Section Abstract: “In contrast to the classic gene duplication model, we find that a common mode of acquisition of new venom genes in parasitoid wasps is co-option of single-copy genes from non-venom progenitors.” ↩
31.
Bergman, Jerry. “Understanding poisons from a creationist perspective.” CEN Technical Journal (now Journal of Creation) 11(3):353–360. 1997. Read from the creation.com web version, which carries no page numbers; located by section heading. Copyright.
1. 31a.
  Section Some Conclusions: “The toxicity problem is solely a matter of degree, that is, all compounds are toxic in high enough levels, and no compound is toxic in low enough levels.” ↩
32.
Sanders, Harry F. III. “How Did Animals Develop Defense and Attack Structures?” Answers in Genesis. Feb 25, 2026. Read from the downloaded page; located by section heading. Copyright.
1. 32a.
  Section Answers: The Origin of DAS and Parasites: “It is difficult to envision stonefish venom, for example, as having a function other than its current, defensive one. Snake venom, too, with its dual attack and defensive nature, seems difficult to envision in a perfect world.” ↩
2. 32b.
  Section Answers: The Origin of DAS and Parasites: “A lioness refused to even taste a drop of blood, preferring grains and milk!” ↩
3. 32c.
  Section Answers: The Origin of DAS and Parasites: “Alternatively, mutations could have occurred that turned harmless digestive enzymes into venomous killers.” “Prior to the fall, gene duplications like these would not have existed, and these snakes would have had no venom.” ↩ ↩
33.
Stambaugh, James. “Creation's Original Diet and the Changes at the Fall.” Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 5(2):130–138. 1991. Two-column PDF; printed page numbers are footers. Copyright.
1. 33a.
  Page 134: “Yet there is a documented case of a vegetarian lion.” “Even at four years old, the lion could not be trained to eat meat.” ↩
2. 33b.
  Page 136: “This view would say God created razor-sharp claws and teeth that can cut flesh. Yet the animals did not use them for carnivory until after the fall of Adam.” ↩
34.
Creation Ministries International. “Were predators and dangerous animals part of the original creation?” CMI Answers. Jul 8, 2026. Unsigned. Read from the downloaded page; located by paragraph. Copyright.
1. 34a.
  Paragraph 4, counting the Short answer as 1: “Sharp teeth can grip fruit or tear tough plant matter, and claws can dig, climb, or display strength during mating contests.” ↩
2. 34b.
  Paragraph 8, the last: “Some argue that predation is actually a good and necessary feature of nature, since it keeps populations in balance and prevents overcrowding. That reasoning may hold in today's world, but it says nothing about what God originally intended.” ↩
35.
Lautenschlager, Stephan. “Morphological and functional diversity in therizinosaur claws and the implications for theropod claw evolution.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 281(1785):20140497. 2014. Read from the PMC HTML. Copyright. Mirror: PMC
1. 35a.
  Section Abstract: “Therizinosaurs are a group of herbivorous theropod dinosaurs from the Cretaceous of North America and Asia, best known for their iconically large and elongate manual claws.” “other taxa were functionally adapted to use the claws as grasping hooks during foraging.” ↩
36.
Freeman, Patricia W. “Frugivorous and animalivorous bats (Microchiroptera): dental and cranial adaptations.” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 33:249–272. 1988. Author's copy from the University of Nebraska repository; folios read from the running heads. The sample is New World bats. Copyright.
1. 36a.
  Page 251: “At least one of the functions of the canine teeth, that of subduing struggling prey, may not apply here. However, the plucking and transporting of enormous fruits, relative to the size of the head of the bat, may require the same canine adaptations as those that eat struggling animals.” ↩
2. 36b.
  Page 263: “average area occupied by the canines of all frugivores compared to that area for animalivores is smaller (14 vs. 19.2%; Fig. 4).” Page 249: “The most derived fruit-eating bats have small canines, wide palates and molars with a distinctive labial rim.” ↩
37.
Thomas, Brian. “A Closer Look at How Pit Vipers 'See' Heat.” Institute for Creation Research. Mar 25, 2010. Read from the downloaded page. Copyright.
1. 37a.
  Section How did this mechanism originate?, fifth paragraph: “Though it is quite speculative, pit vipers' pits could have been used as specialized odor-detecting organs in the originally "very good" creation, only to have either been altered directly at the time of the Fall of man due to his rebellion against God, or altered naturally by mutations after the Fall.” ↩
38.
Hennigan, Tom. “The Case for Holobaraminic Status in Bears (Family Ursidae) and the Implications Within a Creation Model of Ecology.” Creation Research Society Quarterly 46(4):271–283. 2010. Spring 2010 issue. Free PDF from the CRSQ repository; PDF page n = printed page 270 + n, checked on printed folios 271 and 281. Copyright.
1. 38a.
  Page 271: “They are formidable creatures designed by God to operate in a cursed world.” ↩
2. 38b.
  Page 281: “Future research into latent and directed mutations, expressed by specific environmental triggers, may elucidate the origins of carnivory and other latent characters as hibernation and bile metabolisms.” ↩
39.
Bergman, Jerry. “Evidence for the Lack of Snake Evolution.” Creation Research Society Quarterly 45(4):258–268. 2009. Spring 2009 issue. Free PDF from the CRSQ repository; printed folios read from the running heads. Copyright.
1. 39a.
  Page 260: “The problem for evolution is that the toxin apparatus is a complex unit with many irreducible parts. For example, the poison glands are connected to specially designed teeth, and the brain and nervous system must coordinate the whole system (Holman, 2000).” ↩
40.
Li, Ruiqiang et al. “The sequence and de novo assembly of the giant panda genome.” Nature 463:311–317. 2010. Read from the PMC HTML. Copyright. Mirror: PMC
1. 40a.
  Section diet genes: “indicating that the panda probably has all the necessary components for a carnivorous digestive system. We did not find any homologues of digestive cellulase genes”. ↩
41.
Wang, Xiaoming et al. “Earliest giant panda false thumb suggests conflicting demands for locomotion and feeding.” Scientific Reports 12:10538. 2022. Publisher PDF. CC BY.
1. 41a.
  Page 10: “The panda's short digestive tract, inherited from its carnivoran ancestors, is also poorly suited for extracting nutrients, absorbing less than 20% of digestible dry matter”. “pandas eat prodigious quantities of bamboo, up to 45 kg/day (depending on the season), and spend ~ 15 h/day eating”. ↩
42.
Li, Xia et al. “Pseudogenization of a sweet-receptor gene accounts for cats' indifference toward sugar.” PLoS Genetics 1(1):e3. 2005. Read from the PMC HTML. CC BY.
1. 42a.
  Section Abstract: “the cat Tas1r2 gene shows a 247-base pair microdeletion in exon 3 and stop codons in exons 4 and 6.” “Tas1r2 in tiger and cheetah and in six healthy adult domestic cats all show the similar deletion and stop codons.” ↩
43.
Li, Peng, and Guoyao Wu. “Amino acid nutrition and metabolism in domestic cats and dogs.” Journal of Animal Science and Biotechnology 14:19. 2023. Read from the PMC HTML. CC BY. Mirror: PMC
1. 43a.
  Section amino acid requirements: “cats have a very limited ability to synthesize taurine and arginine [14]. Because taurine is present in animal products but absent from plants [54], cats must be provided with at least a portion of animal-sourced foods or the same essential nutrients from synthetic supplements”. ↩ ↩
44.
Hoy, Sarah R. et al. “The Role of Wolves in Regulating a Chronic Non-communicable Disease, Osteoarthritis, in Prey Populations.” Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 10:819137. 2022. Publisher PDF; page numbers from its footers. Isle Royale, 1975–2007. CC BY.
1. 44a.
  Page 1, abstract: “Wolves showed strong selection for senescent moose and tended to avoid prime-aged adults. However, the presence of severe osteoarthritis, but not mild or moderate osteoarthritis, appeared to increase the vulnerability of prime-aged moose to predation.” ↩
2. 44b.
  Page 4, Results, left column: “Wolf predation accounted for 58.0% of the 1,416 dead moose whose cause-of-death could be determined, with prime-aged individuals accounting for 42.9% of moose killed by wolves.” ↩
45.
Genovart, Meritxell et al. “The young, the weak and the sick: evidence of natural selection by predation.” PLoS ONE 5(3):e9774. 2010. 506 gulls shot at random against 122 killed by trained falcons and hawks at a Mallorca refuse tip, 2003–2007. CC BY.
1. 45a.
  Section Abstract: “we show that raptors did not hunt randomly, but rather preferentially predate on juveniles, sick gulls, and individuals with poor muscle condition.” ↩
46.
Sinclair, A. R. E. et al. “Patterns of predation in a diverse predator–prey system.” Nature 425(6955):288–290. 2003. Abstract only, read from PubMed (PMID 13679915). Copyright.
1. 46a.
  Section Abstract: “Small ungulates in Serengeti are exposed to more predators, owing to opportunistic predation, than are larger ungulates; they also suffer greater predation rates, and experience strong predation pressure. A threshold occurs at prey body sizes of approximately 150 kg, above which ungulate species have few natural predators and exhibit food limitation.” ↩
47.
Kruuk, Hans. The Spotted Hyena: A Study of Predation and Social Behavior. University of Chicago Press. 1974. First published 1972; the archive.org item spottedhyenastud0000kruu_z0n8 is dated 1974. Read by search-inside, not borrowed or stored. Leaf = page + 18, anchored on the section heading Hyenas Hunting Adult Wildebeest at leaf 166 = p. 148 as the contents print it, and on the item's page map.
1. 47a.
  Page 153: “like wild dogs (Estes and Goddard 1967; Kruuk and Turner 1967), they killed the victim by eating it.” “They tear chunks away of skin, muscles, and intestines, and this will bring down the victim and kill it in anything from 1 to 13 min (average 6.3 min).” ↩ ↩
48.
Steiner-Bogdaszewska, Żaneta et al. “Composition and Fatty Acid Profile of Bone Marrow in Farmed Fallow Deer (Dama dama) Depending on Diet.” Animals 12(8):941. 2022. Read from the PMC HTML. CC BY. Mirror: PMC
1. 48a.
  Section Introduction: “Many researchers regard bone marrow as an indicator of the health status in ungulates, as it is the last adipose tissue to be mobilized during starvation periods”. ↩