6 Horrifying Hunting Adaptations In Nature

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. Centipedes are also eating bats.

5. 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.

6. 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."

7. Centipede eating a bat.

8. Catfish are learning to eat birds.

9. 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.

10. Frogs are swallowing rats whole.

11. 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.

12. 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."

13. Praying Mantises are snatching birds.

14. 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.

15. Larger mantises are perfectly capable of snagging passing birds in flight, and can also take on some lizards, frogs, snakes, and rodents.

16. 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.

17. Moths Are developing a taste for blood.

18. 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.

19. This spike is used like a hypodermic needle on mammals (humans included.)

20. 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.