We humans don’t know how good we have it being the dominant species at the top of the food chain. Sure, other animals might get a few of us every once in a while, but we don’t have any natural predators to speak of. To illustrate my point of just how good we have it, I’d like to show you what Redditor RicarduZonta found inside a couple of wasp nests while cleaning his home…
RicarduZonta’s mother noticed a couple of wasp nests situated in a particular doorframe and tasked him with removing them. Here is a picture of the wasp that made them before the great cleaning.
Here are the nests in question. Do those look a little abnormal to you?
RicarduZonta said he was very interested in seeing what was inside each of them…
So of course he opened up each of the little nests to see for himself what was going on.
Each of them was packed with, shall we say, various goodies.
The goodies, in this case, were paralyzed but usually still alive spiders. The cruel insect responsible this gruesome punishment was a mud dauber wasp. They hunt spiders for their young to feed on as they grow.
Instead of killing the spider outright, the wasp’s sting paralyzes the spider. Then, it lays an egg on the spider’s body and creates a protective nest around the spider and egg. When the egg hatches, it will slowly eat the spider alive as it grows. There is nothing the arachnid can do to escape.
Talk about a horrifying way to die.
Once the larva has consumed all of the spider(s), it begins to make a cocoon for its final transformation.
Yikes.
This was one of the spiders that RicarduZonta found inside the nests. It was still very much alive, but completely paralyzed.
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