Huntsman spiders are usually pretty high-up on the food chain, making meals of roaches and even small lizards and rodents, but up against a spider wasp they will typically lose and suffer a fate worse than death.
A video, taken by Darren Frankish on November 11 in the courtyard of his Rochedale South, Queensland, home, shows what he believed was a hornet dragging off a huntsman up the side of his house for later consumption. Nature, however, is so much crueller.
Closer observation indicates the hornet was actually a spider wasp, commonly found in and around suburban Brisbane.
The spider wasps doesn’t necessarily consume the huntsman, but in many cases use the arachnid as a baby incubator as part of its horrifying reproduction cycle. As noted in an ABC report, the wasps seek live huntsman to sting them with a powerful paralysing toxin before dragging then back to their mud nest. Some species of spider wasps may chop off the legs of the spider for easier transport, according to the Queensland Museum.
They then lay a single egg into the spider’s abdomen, which will hatch a larvae that will eat the host from the inside out, leaving its vital organs last as a means to keep its meal as fresh as possible. They will usually choose a host larger than itself, because the larvae needs to complete its development cycle on one host. Credit: Darren Frankish via Storyful
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