Betty was HUNGRY!

It’s October. That means I’ve got free rein to post horrifying spider videos, right?

I’ve got a feeding schedule for my colony, so every Monday and Thursday I open up the incubator and fling a bunch of living, walking, wingless Drosophila into every spider tube.

Today is Monday.

Now usually, the spiders sit unperturbed by the intrusion of insects into their domain, and they’ll just watch and wait, and the next day I find the withered corpses of their prey in their webs. Today, I guess Betty was hungry, because she leapt unto one of the hapless flies within seconds of it landing on the web. She was so fast she had it trussed like a Christmas turkey before I could get her under a camera.

I got a bit of the aftermath in a video, at least. It’s below the fold. It’s probably not a good one for the arachnophobes to watch.

One more ghastly detail. The poor fly, after it was gnawed on by Betty, made one last desperate bid for immortality by laying an egg. How sad.

The doomed fly needn’t have worried. I’m sure she left lots of progeny in the fly medium I took her from — progeny who will all grow up to be fed into the venomous maws of spiders. Bwahahahaha!

Man, spiders do bring out the villain in me.