Most dangurs snak

Saw-scaled viper

This viper, Echis carinatus, which inhabits parts of India and the Middle East, doesn't possess the strongest of venoms, but is responsible for more human deaths annually than any other snake, partly because it's often found in populated areas.

Black mamba

The fastest snake in the world is also one of the deadliest. The black mamba (Dendroaspis polylepis) can move at speeds of up to 12.5 miles per hour (5.5 meters per second), and its bite can kill a human being in less than 30 minutes. This snake is known for using its lethal fangs to repeatedly stab those unfortunate enough to get in its way, with each bite injecting a deadly amount of neurotoxic venom.

Originally published on Live Science.

A red Mozambique spitting cobra 

All cobras are venomous, but the aptly named spitting cobra goes one step further to spray blinding venom from its fangs at would-be predators.

Remarkably, these serpents can hit a victim's eyes from more than 5 feet (1.5 m) away even as they are moving with roughly 90-percent accuracy. It turns out these snakes achieve their extraordinary aim by predicting where their targets are going to be in roughly half the time it takes to blink an eye.

To analyze how these reptiles were such dead shots, functional morphologist Bruce Young at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell stood behind a sheet of plastic and recorded the venom sprays of spitting cobrasin South Africa as they aimed for his eyes.

Curiously, the snakes wiggled their heads right before letting fly. A colleague of Young, herpetologist Guido Westhoff at the University of Bonn in Germany, had also seen this head shake in the cobras, so the researchers and their colleagues worked together to figure out what it might accomplish.

To provoke the serpents to spit, "I just put on the goggles and the cobras start spitting all over," Young said. He also donned a visor fitted with accelerometers to track his head movements. At the same time, the other researchers filmed the cobra's movements at 500 frames per second, or roughly 20 times faster than the average camera speed.