Take One Snail And Call Me In The Morning...continued
Attack Of The Killer Snails
The hunting strategy of fish-eating cone snails starts with deception: the cone snails bury themselves, leaving only a proboscis waving above the reef floor. To a passing fish the proboscis looks like a worm -- its next meal. But once the fish comes close enough, the cone snail launches a miniature harpoon from the proboscis and uses it to inject a cocktail of poisons. The cone snail then emerges from the reef floor and devours its paralyzed prey.
As a recent hire at the University of the Philippines, Baldomero Olivera decided to work out how the cone snails killed fish (and, for the species Conus geographus, humans) so quickly and efficiently. "We thought the venoms would be relatively simple," he says. "We just thought we would categorize a couple of toxins."
What came out, after a painstaking process of ‘milking’ the cone snails, was a complex mixture of chemicals. But Olivera began to suspect that the complexity was a red herring. Many of the chemicals had no effect when they were injected into mice. "There were a lot of peaks, but a lot of them were inactive," says Olivera. "We weren’t sure what to make of these inactive peaks."
Olivera moved to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City and resumed his work on how DNA is copied. His snail toxins, or conotoxins, were interesting but didn’t seem to be the sort of work to build a career on.
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