Photographs: Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History

The red spitting cobra of eastern Africa can shoot venom through its fangs into the eyes of predators six feet away—and rarely misses a target. “It’s incredibly painful, and can cause permanent blindness,” notes curator Darrel R. Frost. But its victims, he says, rarely die from the attack. “If you live in a world full of elephants and rhinos, you want to keep them from stepping on you. The trouble is, if you bite an elephant and it dies, it hasn’t learned anything. It’s better for the snake to have some sublethal response.”

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