so today I thought I would make a post about a real spider,
that eats poisonous snakes, I kid you not! and
not just any snake, mind you; these arachnids prey upon the most venomous
snakes in the world, the spider in question is the Australian redback, (Latrodectus hasselti), image
Credit: Daniel R. Crook via ScienceNews, and one of the snakes it eats is the juvenile
eastern brown snake, (Pseudonaja textilis),which are among the most venomous serpents in the world.
A snake that gets trapped in a redback’s web — a messy tangle of long, sticky
silk threads that dangle to the ground — is quickly set upon by the spider,
which subdues the struggling victim with more sticky silk before delivering a
toxic bite that eventually kills the snake, biologist
Martin Nyffeler describes this finding as “very fascinating and a little
frightening”, and it really is what he describes, but it’s
not just the Australian redback spider that is capable of killing (and then
eating) snakes, as there are at least 11 different families of spiders capable
of doing the same thing,
like this one, a brown widow spider, (Latrodectus geometricus) inspects a common garter snake, (Thamnophis
sirtalis) trapped in its web, photograph Julia Safer via ScienceNews, hopefully we do not have any of these in the UK, but if you want to read more about these fascinating snake eating spiders have a look here at ScienceNews.
No thank you. I do not like spiders!
ReplyDeleteJohn and Alley
Dear John and Alley, my phobia is heights, I guess we all have one, best regards, Stan and Diana.
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