Goliath Tarantula Eats The Head Right Off A Bird

Spider

Hopefully you aren’t afraid of spiders, because this visual will be stuck in your head for quite some time.

The horrifying video you’ll scroll down to in just a few moments shows a Goliath Spider making short work of a full grown bird. Specifically, it is chowing down on just the head of the flying animal, and seems to be really savoring each and every bite.

A nickname for this species of tarantula just so happens to be the “Goliath Bird-eating Spider,” which seems to be pretty fitting based on this video.

Found primarily in South America (make note of that if you never want to run into these things), the Goliath tarantula is the biggest spider on the planet both in body length and in mass.

As for why the species got their nickname, apparently “Bird-eating” stems from a copper engraving from the 18th century which depicts one of these Goliaths eating a hummingbird. Upon further research by yours truly, it also derives from this gnarly video that you are about to watch.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this other fun fact about the Goliath tarantula. Females have a life expectancy of 15 to 25 years, whereas their male counterparts are only expected to live for 3 to 6. Pretty easy to say “advantage females” on that one, and it’s not particularly close.

Getting to the video, it appears that someone happened to walk out on their deck or porch and witnessed this spider having “fresh bird” for dinner. Naturally, they took their phone out and began to record the tarantula as it slowly and scarily chews on its prey.

I’d say that they got a little too close to the spider for comfort, which I’m sure the creature isn’t very fond of. The feeling the tarantula has is probably similar to the feeling us humans have when we are trying to eat our meal in peace and the restaurant server keeps stopping by way too often checking in on how everything is going (I recognize that is a very privileged gripe, but you know what I’m saying).

Clearly the Goliath Bird-eating spider is busy living up to its name and just wants some space to relax and enjoy it. How the thing captured the bird beats me, but getting to watch it horrifyingly snack on the winged creature is really all that matters.

I don’t know if I’m buying this person’s story, but the caption for the video states:

“This morning I heard some strange sound on my terrace…then I found this!”

And as you would imagine, social media users in the comments were terrified at the sight of this massive spider casually eating an adult bird:

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