“There’s no easy way for a rattlesnake to defend itself with venom against a spider,” says Emily Taylor, a snake biologist and director of the Physiological Ecology of Reptiles Laboratory at California Polytechnic State University.

But what good is venom when your foe is too small to pierce with a fang? Snakes are basically all rock-hard ab muscles!”Īround 30 percent of the snakes were also venomous, such as the New World coral snakes, Australian brown snakes, rattlesnakes, and Neotropical lancehead snakes. “I kind of assumed that a snake could rip their way out and get to safety. “Even though I talk all the time about how strong spider silk is, I think I was still underestimating this incredible material,” Sebastian Echeverri, a spider scientist and editor of Arachnofiles, said by email.

The spider then takes its time slurping up the insides, with some meals stretching out days and even weeks. Digestive enzymes in the spider’s bite liquefy the snake’s soft parts, just as they would with a fly. Once caught, the spider delivers its venomous bite to paralyze its victim, wraps the snake in silk, and hauls it aloft to dine. In most cases (such as the theridiids), these itsy-bitsy spiders build extremely tough webs, which often extend to the ground and ensnare unsuspecting snakes. (See 10 pictures that will make you love spiders.) But even these little serpents are many times the size of the arachnids, which averaged body lengths of less than half an inch. On average, the snakes preyed upon by spiders are small-usually around just 10 inches in length. “To fully understand the spiders’ important role in the balance of nature it is crucial to understand the entire spectrum of their feeding habits.” How spiders attack “All spiders of the world combined would weigh an estimated 25 million tons, and they would kill about 400 to 800 million tons of prey per year,” he says. The research also significantly expands our knowledge of spider predation, which could play a bigger role in the balance of the ecosystem than previously thought, Nyffeler adds. (Read about the first documented case of a tarantula eating a snake in the wild.) Even more curious, the vast majority of these reports happened not in the tropics, but across North America. Instead, a spider family known as the theridiids, which includes black widows and their kin, were responsible for capturing the most snakes. But they weren’t the snake-eating champs. Unauthorized use is prohibited.Īs you might expect, large spiders such as tarantulas were among those most likely to take on a reptile. The data encompassed more than 40 spider species and more than 90 snake species. Whitfield Gibbons, scoured every piece of scientific literature they could find, as well as social media sites, news coverage, and even old issues of National Geographic, to unearth more than 300 observations of spiders killing snakes. In all, Nyffeler and his co-author, University of Georgia snake expert J. “All of this was unknown before,” says Nyffeler in an email.

I was surprised that so many different snake species are occasionally killed by spiders.” “I was surprised that so many different spider groups are capable of killing and eating snakes. “I was surprised that snake-eating by spiders can be found on all continents (except Antarctica),” says study leader Martin Nyffeler, a spider expert at the University of Basel in Switzerland. The answer is a resounding yes-so much so that even the scientists who conducted the study were stunned by their results. The question might sound like a schoolyard hypothetical, but it’s the topic of a new study published in the Journal of Arachnology.

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