In a quiet room at the Australian Reptile Park, Emma Teni spends her days milking the world’s most dangerous spiders—not for thrills, but to save lives. Armed with bright pink tweezers and a steady hand, she extracts venom from Sydney funnel-web spiders, one of Australia’s deadliest arachnids, as part of a government-run antivenom program that has prevented a single death since 1981. Each spider produces only a tiny amount of venom, and it takes hundreds to create just one vial of life-saving serum. Locals are even encouraged to safely capture any funnel-webs they find and turn them in—no small feat when one bite can be lethal in under 15 minutes.
At the same park, venom is collected from snakes like the King Brown and Eastern Brown—species deadly enough to kill multiple humans with a single bite. The venom is sent to a Melbourne lab, where it’s turned into antivenom using horses and rabbits that develop immunity through controlled exposure. These powerful serums are distributed across Australia and even to Papua New Guinea, where snakebite deaths are far more common. Thanks to this remarkable work, some of the world’s scariest animals are now among its greatest healers.