A dinner plate-sized tarantula with a big appetite preyed on a young opossum during a recent hunt in the Amazon rainforest — and the horrifying encounter was caught on tape. Biologists at the University of Michigan (U of M) studied rare predator-prey interactions, particularly between arthropods and small vertebrates, over the course of a few years in the lowland rainforest located near the Andes foothills. They detailed 15 different predation events in a paper published in "Amphibian & Reptile Conservation" on Thursday. Every interaction was brutal (in its own way), but none was perhaps as vicious as the late-night slaughter of a mouse opossum by a tarantula (theraphosid spider). After about five minutes, the creature became motionless and the spider dragged it behind a tree root, disappearing into the darkness.

Source: Fox News February 28, 2019 21:56 UTC