What do you think of spiders? Similar to snakes, there are many people who are afraid of spiders in real life. Most spiders have 8 eyes, it is said that some of the eyes are used during the day, some are used for night vision, if you look closely at the spiders, see their eight eyes, I may be scared to run at least 8 meters away. In addition to the eyes in particular, the spider's feet are also very large, there are 8. For humans with only one pair of eyes and one pair of feet, this structure is too strange and even a little scary.
Not all spiders are poisonous, and the spiders we encounter in our daily lives rarely have venom glands, but people's fear of spiders seems to have been engraved in their genes. The more common view in the scientific community is that the ancestors of humans died when they were in the burrowing era, because they were attacked by poisonous spiders, so this fear of spiders for survival was inherited from generation to generation.
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Normally, spiders' diets include insects, worms, other spiders, and polypods. But some arachnids are wilder than we think, and they are able to eat snakes up to 30 times larger than they think.
After all, in our senses, the difference in the size of snakes and spiders is very different, how do spiders hunt snakes?
In the case of the Australian red-backed spider, excluding their legs, the female red-backed is only the size of a candy, but it can hunt prey that is much larger than itself, such as the underage Australian brown snake, which is one of the most venomous snakes in the world. The web of the red-backed spider is made of long, sticky silk threads, and then hangs on the ground, when a snake accidentally gets entangled in the web of the red-backed spider, the spider will quickly attack the prey, and then use its own silk thread to further subdue the struggler, and then give the snake a fatal bite, killing the snake.
So how many spiders in the world like to eat snakes?
The red-backed spider is not the only spider that likes to eat snakes, and an article published in the Journal of Spider science shows that at least 11 different spiders have been found to feed on snakes.
With the exception of Antarctica, this spider is present on almost every continent, especially in the United States and Australia, where the most snake-eating spider species are found.
So which snakes will be the prey of spiders?
Spider prey has seven main subjects, including coral snakes, rattlesnakes, brown vipers and gunhead snakes, which are extremely venomous. Coral snakes belong to small and medium-sized snakes, rattlesnakes vary in size, some may be only 30 centimeters, some can reach 2 meters; the length of vipers is generally about 1 meter. These snakes may not be huge among snakes, but if you think about spiders, they are much smaller.
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Who is the spider with the highest level of hunting? According to scientists, North American black widows and red-backed spiders should be the most successful snake catchers, they are smaller, but they can easily catch snakes 10-30 times larger than their own size.
Scientists once found in the United States that a round spider hunted a green snake up to 1 meter long, which is the largest snake in all the cases studied. Scientists are surprised that the green snake will originally hunt round spiders for food, and the risk of catching the green snake is quite high, that is, the green snake seems to be killed by its prey.
Of course, not all snake-eating spiders hunt with webs. For example, tarantulas are even more ruthless, once the prey is determined, the tarantula will grab the head of the prey snake, and then use its own venom to poison the snake, once the venom works, it will hunt successfully.
Once the prey is dead, the spider secretes a specific enzyme that makes the prey's body soft and becomes a soup-like substance, and then they will suck the prey into their stomachs as if they had brought their own straw.
Although some spiders eat snakes, they do not feed only on snakes. Another exception is the South American tarantula, which basically catches only frogs and snakes.
It's hard to imagine that such a small spider can hunt a snake so many times larger than itself, which makes us lament that the natural world is really full of magic. Do spiders eat snakes because they love to eat snakes, or are they forced by life?
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