€?Dinner Plate’-Sized Spider Seen Dragging Off Opossum For Furry Meal

Well, actually, giant spiders exist all over the world, from the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas to Sri Lanka to Australia, because of course Australia. And when you're the size of a dinner plate, well, it's kind of tough to cram yourself into a dark corner where no one will notice you. So wherever giant spiders share space with human beings, there are bound to be some unpleasant encounters. Here are a few of the worst because hey, who needs to sleep ever again?

‘Dinner Plate’-Sized Spider Seen Dragging Off Opossum For Furry Meal

In southeastern Peru, there's an enormous dinner plate-sized spider that lives in the jungle and eats opossums. Probably not as a habit, but a video that went viral in March 2019 clearly shows a spider hauling off a small marsupial. Ecologist and evolutionary biologist Dan Rabosky told the Washington Post that large spiders in the Amazon do, in fact, kill vertebrates like frogs, lizards, and opossums (though granted, the opossum in the video was a small "mouse" opossum so it's not like the spider was dragging some cat-sized thing around the forest floor or anything).

It was almost midnight in the Peruvian Amazon, when scientists from the University of Michigan heard a scratching noise in the leaves and saw a dinner-plate-sized tarantula dragging a mouse opossum along the forest floor.