Nature

Honey badgers survive snake venom that kills almost everything else

Honey badgers routinely eat venomous snakes and take bites that would kill most mammals many times over. Their nicotinic acetylcholine receptors carry the same defensive mutation found in mongooses, pigs and hedgehogs, which stops snake neurotoxins from locking onto nerve and muscle cells. It's a case of unrelated species evolving the identical molecular fix independently.

Danielle H. Drabeck, Antony M. Dean, and Sharon A. Jansa, Why the Honey Badger Don't Care: Convergent Evolution of Venom-Targeted Nicotinic Acetylcholine Receptors in Mammals That Survive Snakebite — Toxicon, 2015

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