The South American Goliath birdeater, the world's largest spider, weighs about as much as a puppy, has a 12-inch leg-span and probably causes all who look in its eyes to turn to stone.
Entomologist Piotr Naskrecki detailed a run-in he had with one of the creatures in the rainforest of Guyana on his blog, "The Smaller Majority."
Naskrecki says he was taking a night stroll through the rainforest when he heard what sounded like tiny horse hooves hitting the ground. You know where this is going. There was no horse, only a spider. An enormous, horse-spider-beast capable of puncturing a mouse skull with its fangs.
Though it doesn't typically get the chance to eat birds, the Goliath birdeater feeds on pretty much anything that moves around on the ground -- frogs, mice, bugs, the usual spider stuff.
The goliath birdeater tarantula is the biggest spider in the world. They eat birds but they prefer money & rulers. pic.twitter.com/Anko0huA5b— Lizardo VonSpidereye (@randomover2) June 26, 2014
If the size and skull-puncturing isn't enough to make you never want to come near one, the spider also flings spiked hairs off of its butt to defend from predators. Naskrecki was lucky enough to experience a few of these hairs hitting his bare eyeballs.
"Every time I got too close to the birdeater it would ... start rubbing its hind legs against the hairy abdomen," Naskrecki writes. "'Oh, how cute!' I thought when I first saw this adorable behavior, until a cloud of urticating hair hit my eyeballs, and made me itch and cry for several days."
We'll be over here, never going to the rain forests of Guyana. Ever.
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