A dinner plate-sized tarantula killed an opossum in the dark jungle

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The dark jungle is full of terrors. 

As it should be, because chaos reigns in the wild, and spotting the peculiar or unexpected is the norm.

“We’re always seeing crazy things,” University of Michigan evolutionary biologist Daniel Rabosky said in an interview. 

Each year Rabosky travels to the Amazon to observe and document the flourishing biodiversity deep in these jungles. On a recent trip to the Peruvian Amazon, his team filmed some nightmarish predator-prey interactions, including a large Tarantula dragging a limp opossum — a rat-like marsupial — across the dark jungle floor. 

“The body on that thing is bigger than a baseball,” said Rabosky, referring to the spider and adding that if its legs were spread out, the spider would be the size of a dinner plate.  Read more…

More about Science, Spiders, Tarantula, Biodiversity, and Amazon Rainforest

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