Clash of the Titans

It’s a clash of giants. They face off, dancing around each other, advancing and attacking, defending and retreating. It’s a battle that at first appears will be won by the larger, but the evidence says it was never going to end that way. The smaller was always going to win. The victor takes its quarry and begins dragging it away.

I have been watching a huntsman spider and a spider wasp fight. Not just once, but on several occasions. The huntsmen, with bodies the size of a twenty-cent piece and hairy legs spanning a hands-width, look like an overly ambitious target for the wasps. The wasps are about three centimetres long, big for a wasp but dwarfed by the spiders. But the key is in the naming: spider wasps. Called so not because they in any way resemble a spider, but rather because they prey upon spiders. Big spiders.