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Newly released footage taken by a team of researchers shows a massive tarantula the size of a drilled flat, it's next to the floor of the Peruvian rainforest in the dead of night.
The footage was captured during a recent scientific expedition to southeastern Peru's Madre de Dios region. University of Michigan evolutionary biologist Daniel Rabosky was leading a team of researchers to study spiders, scorpions and other arthropods to learn more.
"The opossum had already been grieved, but it was not enough.
The video is the first known record of a mygalomorph spider feeding on an opossum, the university said.
"We were pretty ecstatic and shocked, and we could not really believe what we were seeing," Grundler added. "We knew we were witnessing something pretty special, but we were not aware that it was the first observation until after the fact."
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Rabosky has made the expeditions for more than a decade, and comments from him and his team members are compiled in a recently published scientific paper. Rabosky and his team also read the following articles: Ctenidae spiders preying on the frogs and lizards, a centipede centipede, and another snake-eater snake-eater, another centipede eating a decapitated coral snake and more than a dozen other incidents.
"This is an underappreciated source of mortality among vertebrates," Rabosky said. "A surprising amount of death of small vertebrates in the Amazon is likely to arthropods such as big spiders and centipedes."
Predatory spiders and other arthropods are more easily available, researchers said. In addition to larger jaws, beaks and fangs, some arthropods also have venomous proteins capable of immobilizing their prey.
The paper, "Ecological interactions between arthropods and small vertebrates in a lowland Amazon rainforest," is published in the journal Amphibian & Reptile Conservation.
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