As humans we are fascinated by numbers and rankings. We instinctively want to order our world and rank things. I am no different and I thought I would like to see what the top ten deadliest snakes would look like. When I started this site I thought it would be easy. I figured somewhere someone would have calculated how much venom from each snake would be a deadly amount of venom. I was soon to find out that I was very, very, wrong. Not only do the experts not agree on what are the top ten deadliest snakes they don't even agree on the names of the snakes. I knew there could be multiple common names for the same snake, but I never thought there could be multiple spellings of the scientific name for the same snake.

Once that problem is solved there is the problem of how to measure "deadliest". Is it the amount of venom needed, or the likelihood of death if bitten, or is it number of people who have survived attacks, or is it based on the number of people per year who lose their life to a particular snake?

It was my intention in creating this site to list the top ten deadliest snakes according to the potency of the snake's venom. Well it did not quite work out that way. One problem, as I see it is, if potency was the only measure then most of the snakes would be sea snakes and from the same genus. I wanted each family of snakes to be represented only once. Also, there are different ways for snakes to deliver venom intramuscular, intraperitoneal, intravenous, and subcutaneous for example. Obviously the snake is not thinking about what method to use when delivering venom and the method the venom will actually be delivered is subject to many factors all of which will be affected by chance. Of the methods I agreed that the method most applicable to human bites would be subcutaneous. I also looked at how the test was performed and found a site that has collected that data from multiple sources then compiled and averaged the information to come up with a list. In addition I looked on the internet for herpetologists who have compiled a list of the ten deadliest snakes to find what list comes up most often. I did not average the members, but looked at the list as a whole in selecting a top ten of my own.

The snakes are listed in order from the 10th most lethal to the most lethal at number 1. One more thing, just in case you were wondering the beautiful snake at the top of this page is a red corn snake and is a non-venomous constrictor!