Tarantula Found Eating a Snake in Wild for First Time
The bloody scene, witnessed in Brazil, confirms that tarantulas are hardly picky eaters.
Scientists have made a grisly discovery: the first recorded instance of a tarantula eating a snake in the wild.
Leandro Malta Borges, a graduate student at Brazil’s Federal University of Santa Maria, stumbled across the macabre scene on October 23, 2015, while he and his colleagues were walking through a grassland in southern Brazil called Serra do Caverá. (Watch a giant spider drag a mouse.)
Underneath a rock, they found a foot-long specimen of Erythrolamprus almadensis, a non-venomous snake—but its front and middle regions had been ripped to shreds by a large species of tarantula called Grammostola quirogai.
As Borges looked on, the tarantula huddled over the decomposing snake, chowing down on the exposed, liquefied guts.
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