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Larger Puff Adders Did Not Yield More Venom in a 24-Snake Study

Young puff adder stretched across sandy ground in Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park
Research · Physiology

A study of venom production in African snakes found no relationship between body size and the amount of fresh venom obtained from puff adders (Bitis arietans). The researchers measured 24 individuals and found that neither body weight nor snout-to-vent length predicted wet venom yield. The study was first available online on 3 March 2026 in Toxicon: X.

All venom samples came from 24 puff adders kept at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine’s herpetarium; the paper lists them as captive-bred and/or of Eswatini, Nigerian and Tanzanian origin. The researchers collected fresh venom under standardised conditions and recorded venom mass, body weight and snout-to-vent length.

Venom Yield Varied Widely but Was Not Linked to Body Size

Puff adders yielded an average of 443 mg of fresh venom per extraction, with individual values ranging from 199 to 935 mg. Despite this wide variation, neither length nor weight was related to venom yield.

This differed from the green bush viper (Atheris squamigera), in which both length and body weight were positively associated with venom yield. Echis romani, like the puff adder, showed no relationship between body size and venom yield.

Puff Adder Venom Averaged 188 mg of Protein per Millilitre

The study also compared several ways of measuring venom protein and found that the BCA method gave the most accurate results across the venoms and isolated toxins tested. Using this method, puff adder venom averaged 188 mg of protein per millilitre.

Using wet venom yield and protein concentration, the authors estimated an average of about 80 mg of protein in the venom collected from a puff adder. They describe these estimates as tentative because venom extraction is only a model for how much venom might be delivered during an actual bite.

Sources and image credit

  1. French, S., Da Silva, R., ten Have, M., Crittenden, E., Rowley, P., Cullen, I. C., Holland, Z., Wilkinson, M. C., & Modahl, C. M. (2026). Quantifying venom in African snakes: Insights into protein content, yield and body size associations. Toxicon: X, 30, 100245. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.toxcx.2026.100245Primary peer-reviewed study dated 3 March 2026. It included 24 puff adders from the LSTM herpetarium and found no relationship between wet venom yield and either weight or snout-to-vent length. The published article is open access under CC BY 4.0.

Image: Bernard DUPONT — young wild puff adder in the Nossob Riverbed, Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, South Africa; Wikimedia Commons/Flickr; representative species image · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Source

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