6 Horrifying Hunting Adaptations In Nature

Reminding us how precarious our spot on the evolutionary ladder may be.

Published 9 years ago in Creepy

Reminding us how precarious our spot on the evolutionary ladder may be.

1
Horned frogs are known for a monstrous, gaping chasm for a mouth and an appetite that's best described as "indiscriminate." Their mouths appear to account for half of their entire body, which explains their other common name, the Pac Man frog. They'll eat insects, of course, but will also gleefully slurp down other frog species, lizards, mice, and each other.

2
Global warming may be allowing vampire moths to increase their range, as they've been showing up with increasing frequency in areas that gratefully never before had to include "painful biting moth" on their list of things to complain about.

3
This spike is used like a hypodermic needle on mammals (humans included.)
4
Most moths of the genus Calyptra are fruit eaters, and all of them started out that way, but a few of them figured out that the same terrifying face spike that they'd been using to pierce the outer skin of fruit could be put to much better use in order to feast on the blood of the living.

5
Moths Are developing a taste for blood.
6
This hungry mantis captured and killed a hummingbird not much smaller than itself. The mantis used its spiny left foreleg to impale the hummingbird through the chest while leaving his right leg free.
7
Larger mantises are perfectly capable of snagging passing birds in flight, and can also take on some lizards, frogs, snakes, and rodents.

8
The praying mantis is already one of the world's more unpleasant creatures -- it looks like a miniature alien, and it tends to be way bigger than an insect has any right to be. But as much as you don't want one of these things landing on your face, it's still hard to imagine that they're capable of eviscerating anything bigger than themselves.
9
Praying Mantises are snatching birds.
10
Horned frogs are so fearlessly voracious that virtually nothing that moves is immune from their unprovoked gobbling attacks -- sometimes to the point where it's downright suicidal, as "some have been found dead in the wild with the remains of an impossible-to-ingest victim still protruding from their mouths."

11
We've known about massive, bird-eating spiders for some time now, but actually catching a bird is more of a freak occurrence than a result of any sort of strategy on the part of the spider. But you know what isn't rare at all? Spiders catching and eating bats. That's happening all the damn time.
12
Frogs are swallowing rats whole.
13
Catfish in France have recently decided to forget about the whole "stuck in the water" aspect of their existence and have been leaping out of the Tarn River onto the land to catch unsuspecting pigeons. It's the same strategy that killer whales use to capture seals.

14
Catfish are learning to eat birds.
15
Centipede eating a bat.
16
The end usually comes quickly for the bat: Using its preferred method of dispatch, the centipede "grips the bat tightly and bites it, usually on the back of the neck, injecting [its] deadly venom."

17
In the Amazon, centipedes can get big, really big. The largest of their kind is Scolopendra gigantea, the Peruvian giant yellow-leg centipede. They can grow up to a foot in length, with reports of some Venezuelan versions reaching 18 inches.
18
Centipedes are also eating bats.
19
Most of the time, the bats are ensnared in strategically placed webs, but not always. Some spiders dispense with all that extra effort and may simply crawl into caves and throttle bats while they sleep, as some huntsman spiders and tarantulas have been observed devouring them on forest floors.

20
New studies have revealed that spiders are indeed eating bats, and that they're doing it deliberately. Not just one type of spider, mind you, but lots of different species are doing this on a regular basis, and it's happening everywhere. Researchers found out that the only place that spiders aren't sucking the life out of bats is Antarctica, and that's probably only because penguins are higher in fat content.