A couple got the shock of their lives when they stumbled across the aftermath of a deadly ‘David and Goliath’ style battle between a spider and a snake – and, unsurprisingly, ‘David’ won.
Paul and Bernadette Gibbs photographed the giant female redback spider who had manage to catch a deadly brown snake in her web in their garage, which it then liquefied with its venom and drank it, the Daily Mail reports.
The pair live in Morpeth in Hunter Valley, New South Wales and are used to encountering black and brown snakes, redback spiders and eastern water dragons around their home due to their home’s closeness to the Hunter River, but even they say they’d never seen anything like this.
Surprisingly, these spider versus snake battles are quite common, and only two weeks ago West Australian mother-of-three, Jamii-Leigh Marwick, posted footage on Facebook of a brown snake twisting in a redback’s web in a garage.
Craig Adams, a snake and spider safety expert, told Daily Mail Australia that redbacks are ‘very good web throwers, like Spider-Man’ to target and trap their prey’.
He explained that once the spider was able to overcome the snake, the spider would pierce the snake’s skin, which it would not eat, then liquefy the tissue using its venom and basically drink it, in one of the most NOPE-worthy ways to die we could imagine.
Mr Adams said spiders weren’t prey preference for snakes, but that snakes were able to be consumed by spiders.
Oh Australian wildlife, you so scary!
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