I should save that title for a horror novel.
The other day, I switched my juvenile Latrodectus from a diet of nice snackable fruit flies to huge, relatively speaking, mealworms. I posted a photo of that right here.
I was curious to see how they would cope with such a large prey item. No problem! Here’s the result: the mealworm was sucked completely dry, leaving nothing but a transparent tube of cuticle.
I don’t know how they do it. The prey animal was completely hollowed out. Maybe I’ll have to try to capture it in timelapse.
Moopsy
I know how: https://britishspiders.org.uk/system/files/library/130908.pdf
How big is the spider now?
Yes please if you can!
#2 John Morales: Thanks for the interesting article on spider digestion.
Apparently in some cultures, it is polite to slurp your soup without a straw but by capillary action.
So spiders are similar to us except that they do some of the eating process inside of the prey’s body.
It’s like when I eat a steak: my stomach acid breaks fat down into individual molecules of fat, and breaks proteins down to individual amino acids. Then when this soup is in my small intestine, the fats and the amino acids are absorbed into my bloodstream, and the stomach acid is reused.
I guess that’s about all there is to eating!
Never eat anything bigger than your head.