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Frog eats insect - this is the natural order of things. The Epomis beetle spits upon the natural order of things, then latches onto its face with double-hooked jaws and eats it alive.
The beetle hunts frogs in two ways. As a larve, it actually waves to a frog to lure it in, waits until the tongue comes out, grabs on for a zip-line to the frog’s face, and starts to chew. The beetle always wins.
The adult jumps onto a frog’s back, cuts through its leg muscles to paralyse it, and then eats it alive.
More horrific photos and videos
What’s scarier than a centipede? A centipede that sprints.
The house centipede has the same poison fangs that normal centipedes do, but they can move towards you at great speed thanks to its long spindly legs. They have a top speed of 40 cm per second.
Incidentally, 40 cm is the exact distance between the house centipede and your face.
Here’s the mouth of the reticulated python; behind it lies up to 10 metres of snake. Fortunately, you’ll never have to know what it’s like to be swallowed by this mouth. GOOD NEWS! Unfortunately, that’s because the python will have suffocated the life out of you first. BAD NEWS!
Do giant snakes like this actually eat people? Yes. Yes they really do. There’s a Philippine tribe where a quarter of the men have been attacked by these snakes.
(By the way, see the hole in the bottom of the mouth? That helps the python to breathe when it’s swallowing a meal much larger than itself. I’m sure you’ll be delighted to know that after it choked you to death, you won’t return the favour.)
Image: ARKive
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Everyone loves cookies. Cookies are fun! The Cookie Monster is cute!
Yes, well the fun and cute end with the cookie-cutter shark, because the “cookie” in its name is more accurately described by “bloody hunk of carved flesh”. Thankfully, the shark’s just 2 ft long, but there is at least one documented case of an attack on humans.
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What’s worse than venomous snake fangs? Really long venomous snake fangs. And those of the Gaboon viper’s are the longest in the world - up to 2 inches in some cases. As in all vipers, the fangs hinge backwards so the snake doesn’t stab itself through its lower jaw when it closes its mouth. Evolution FTW.
The stoplight loosejaw can dislocate its head and lunge its jaw at food, a trick that many of us have surely tried but few have succeeded at. Note that the lower jaw has no floor to it.
Source: NHM. More info here.
This post is NSFA (not safe for arachnophobes). I don’t honestly know why I bothered writing that because if any of you *are* arachnophobes (or, for that matter, sentient), you are currently cowering behind your chair or gently throwing up somewhere.
This is the highly venomous funnel-web spider. It’s part of a large group of spiders whose fangs point down rather than towards each other. The upshot of this is that they need to rear upwards before they bite.
