Females will lay a clutch of 11 to 20 eggs at a time. These snakes are thought to mate in the late winter. During this time, their bodies intertwine, and they lash out at each other with their closed mouths. One of the most interesting facts is that the inland taipan males are thought to engage in combat with each other to compete for mates.Nevertheless, this species should be avoided at all costs. They will only strike if they feel directly threatened. The inland taipan, also known as the fierce snake, small-scaled snake, or western taipan, can easily kill a person with a single bite, but surprisingly very few deaths have ever been recorded. It’s another adaptation to the environmental extremes of where the species lives: the dark winter colour absorbs more heat from the sun, when temperatures are cooler and the lighter colour in summer tends to reflect, rather than absorb solar energy.The inland taipan is thought to produce one of the deadliest venoms in the world. The olive-brown colour of the inland taipan darkens in the winter and is lighter in colour in the summer.
When conditions become too hot these snakes head underground where they shelter in the burrows of digging mammals. Inland taipans are daytime predators that mostly hunt in the cool of the early morning – a behavioural adaptation to their extreme environment. But the potent venom of the inland taipan is so fast-acting that it can afford to hang on to its prey after striking it. Most snakes that kill using venom will strike their prey then move away to avoid being injured as they wait for their victim to die. In times of extended drought, numbers of both species fall. In good times, after rains, numbers of the rat boom, which creates plenty of prey for the taipan and, as a result, its numbers also rise. Its fortunes are strongly linked to those of the long-haired rat ( Rattus villosissimus), a native Australian rodent found in the same habitat. Out in this very remote, semi-arid environment the inland taipan hunts across the cracking clays and loamy soils of the outback floodplains of the Channel country.
The reason why is undoubtedly because it’s rarely encountered by people: having a very remote and limited distribution, it’s restricted to the far south-west corner of Queensland and far north-east of South Australia. That “world’s most venomous snake” label still holds true today, but the inland taipan can’t be considered the most deadly snake because, fortunately, there has been no recorded human death caused by the species. That claim was first based on experiments with rodents in the 1970s when the venom from one bite was found to be capable of killing a quarter of a million mice. This reptile is regularly labelled the snake with the world’s most toxic venom. Small to medium-sized mammals, particularly native rats and miceĬaptive snakes can live 10 to 15 years, so the potential life span in the wild is assumed to be similarĪdults are mostly seen at no more than 1.6m in length, although it’s thought the species can attain a maximum length of more than 2.5m
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