Spiders Eat Snakes Around The World, Surprising Study Reveals

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“All of this was unknown before,” says Nyffeler in an email.

In all, Nyffeler and his co-author, University of Georgia snake expert J. Whitfield Gibbons, scoured every piece of scientific literature they could find, as well as social media sites, news coverage, and even old issues of National Geographic, to unearth more than 300 observations of spiders killing snakes. The data encompassed more than 40 spider species and more than 90 snake species.

A black widow preys on a snake in New River Gorge National Park in West Virginia.Photograph by Julia Statler

As you might expect, large spiders such as tarantulas were among those most likely to take on a reptile. But they weren’t the snake-eating champs. Instead, a spider family known as the theridiids, which includes black widows and their kin, were responsible for capturing the most snakes. Even more curious, the vast majority of these reports happened not in the tropics, but across North America. (Read about the first documented case of a tarantula eating a snake in the wild.)

The research also significantly expands our knowledge of spider predation, which could play a bigger role in the balance of the ecosystem than previously thought, Nyffeler adds.

“All spiders of the world combined would weigh an estimated 25 million tons, and they would kill about 400 to 800 million tons of prey per year,” he says. “To fully understand the spiders’ important role in the balance of nature it is crucial to understand the entire spectrum of their feeding habits.”

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