Audio By Carbonatix
Field researchers in Brazil nearly crapped themselves when they stumbled upon an ENORMOUS tarantula eating a snake for lunch. They were just trudging through the woods, looked behind a rock, and BOOM: giant fucking spider eating terrifying snake like it was just another day.
It wasn’t exactly easy for the huge tarantula to eat the snake though because as you’ll see below, the snake has the tarantula wrapped up while it’s being devoured.
Furthermore, while it’s known that tarantulas feast on snakes and other species, this is the FIRST TIME EVER a tarantula has been photographed in the act of eating a snake. Previously, scientists have only ever found snake remains inside of tarantula’s digestive systems (and other evidence that they’ve eaten snakes):
https://www.instagram.com/p/BPGgeVwgEsn/
Scientists observed, for the first time, a tarantula eating a snake in the wild https://t.co/nx3z9fTIZA pic.twitter.com/57XzHC7baG
— Gizmodo (@Gizmodo) January 10, 2017
Huge tarantula seen eating a foot-long SNAKE in terrifying scene never before witnessed https://t.co/Di9qKZLtaL pic.twitter.com/DqHYgF6B3B
— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) January 10, 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ghjRCOr0-o
You can see a full set of photographs showing the gigantic tarantula eating the snake over on The Daily Mail.
These photographs were captured by scientists from Federal University of Santa Maria while conducting field research in Serra do Caverá (Southern Brazil). The tarantula photographed here is of the Grammostola genus, and the snake being eaten is a Almaden ground snake which typically only grows to around 15 inches in length.
This is the first time a tarantula has ever been photographed feeding on a snake, and the scientists believe it was likely the snake slithered behind the rock where the tarantula was hiding and fell right into a death trap.
[h/t National Geographic]