We didn’t know that any did:
Take the Australian redback. Not including legs, a female of this species of spider is only about the size of an M&M candy. But she can take down relatively big prey such as juvenile eastern brown snakes, which are among the most venomous serpents in the world. A snake that gets trapped in a redback’s web — a messy tangle of long, sticky silk threads that dangle to the ground — is quickly set upon by the spider, which subdues the struggling victim with more sticky silk before delivering a toxic bite that eventually kills the snake…
“I didn’t realize how common this was. I don’t think anybody did,” says evolutionary biologist Mercedes Burns of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who was not involved in the research.
Asher Jones, “Snake-eating spiders are surprisingly common” at ScienceNews (August 4, 2021)
Some types of spiders can catch snakes 10 to 30 times their size. It is a hidden system of venomous snake control.
The paper is open access.
Hey, slow news day.