Massive Tarantula Dragging Opossum To Its Doom Is Pure Nightmare Fuel

Australia has its fair share of oversized arachnids, but even down under, we’ve never seen a spider as fearsome as this.

A video taken recently in the Amazon shows a tarantula likely 10 inches in diameter, making a meal out of a young opossum. The auspicious encounter was recorded by biologists working with the University of Michigan, studying rare predator-prey interactions in the lowland rainforests of the Andean foothills, Fox News reports.

“This is an underappreciated source of mortality among vertebrates,” Daniel Rabosky, an evolutionary biologist at U of M who leads a team of researchers to the Amazon rainforest about once or twice a year, said in an online statement. “A surprising amount of death of small vertebrates in the Amazon is likely due to arthropods such as big spiders and centipedes.”

To read more on this story, click here: Massive Tarantula Dragging Opossum To Its Doom Is Pure Nightmare Fuel

Goliath Encounter: Puppy-Sized Spider Surprises Scientist in Rainforest

Piotr Naskrecki was taking a nighttime walk in a rainforest in Guyana, when he heard rustling as if something were creeping underfoot. When he turned on his flashlight, he expected to see a small mammal, such as a possum or a rat.

"When I turned on the light, I couldn't quite understand what I was seeing," said Naskrecki, an entomologist and photographer at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology.

To read more on this story, click here: Goliath Encounter: Puppy-Sized Spider Surprises Scientist in Rainforest

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