Monday 23 August 2021

On Friday I Made A Post About Tattoo Spiders,

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.


2 comments:

jpo5626 said...

No thank you. I do not like spiders!
John and Alley

PattayaStan said...

Dear John and Alley, my phobia is heights, I guess we all have one, best regards, Stan and Diana.