I was impressed with the resilience of abalone. We would pop them off the undersides of rocks in 60 feet of water, leave them in canvas bags on the deck of the boat all day, throw them on ice in coolers, pull them out of the coolers hours later, then watch in amazement as they attempted to crawl away on the counter top.
I take a drug called ‘Byetta,’ which was developed from the saliva of the gila monster. It’s used for Type 2 diabetes. Everybody joked for awhile about taking ‘lizard spit,’ but it seems to work very well - at almost $200 a vial, it ought to.
“Exenatide (marketed as Byetta) is the first of a new class of medications (incretin mimetics) approved for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. ... Exenatide is a synthetic version of exendin-4, a hormone in the saliva of the Gila monster, a lizard native to several Southwestern American states. ... Typical human responses to exenatide include improvements in the initial rapid release of endogenous insulin, suppression of pancreatic glucagon release, delayed gastric emptying, and reduced appetite - all of which function to lower blood glucose.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exenatide