World's first venomous crustacean found in Australia Dr Ronald Jenner from Britain's Natural History Museum said the venomous remipede is neither poisonous, nor a crab: "Poison and venom are two very separate things. Venoms are delivered actively by a bite with fangs, or by a spine, or by claws, or injected into something, whereas poison is usually passively delivered - you eat it, you get sick or die. As for the "crab" moniker, remipedes belong to the same family as crabs but crabs they are not. They are closer, in fact, to insects - the born predators combine a blood-curdling hypodermic injection mechanism with powerful prehensile limbs and long, ever-scouring antennae to catch and kill their prey. The critters have been found in underwater caves in Western Australia, as well as in the Caribbean and Canary Islands. The venomous remipedes were identified by a team of scientists from the Natural History Museum led by Dr Jenner and Dr Bjoern von Reumont. So can they kill a human? "We were wondering about that," said Dr Jenner. In the literature there's nothing on it, so I was trying to convince [von Reumont] to allow himself to be bitten. But on Thursday night Dr Jenner was approached by a man who claimed to have been bitten by the creature in the past. He said near the village where he lived in Belize these occur near the entry of caves where people swim. The man claimed he was bitten in the leg. The pain, he said, started as a pinch before growing up his leg into his lower back, where it remained for weeks. Based on the venomous chemical cocktail of proteins and neurotoxin detailed by the scientists, and the man's description of his large bite wound being like 'digested tissue', Dr Jenner believes he may have identified a genuine case of a blind remipede bite. When Dr Jenner spoke to the Telegraph on Friday morning he was yet to tell his colleague the good news.