I believe myself to have something of an implicit contract with spiders: I do not interfere with their businesses as long as they visibly do not pose a threat to me. For most spiders, this means that I will leave them entirely alone for the span of their natural life. If a spider is of a particularly venomous species and in a high-traffic area in the home (say, a redback in the toilet), it will be removed, having violated our contract. I also believe that a spider that demonstrates that it can and will eat the flesh of mammals has violated this contract, because that scares the piss out of me.
A tarantula eating an opossum in the Amazon? Violated the contract. A huntsman chowing down on a pygmy possum? Contract. Violated.
Images of a huntsman doing just that were posted to the aptly-named Facebook group Tasmanian Insects and Spiders, and have, I’m sure, given heart attacks to people who had determined the scale of the image based on the normal size of a possum.
Pygmy possums, as you maybe guessed from the name, are quite small (usually ranging from 5 to 12cm in length), but it is nonetheless quite startling to see a spider snacking on a hefty mammal.
In the heavily paraphrased words of David Attenborough, “Nature: it’s a fucken nightmare!“
