An Oct. 3 video captured by YouTube user Mathew Duncan features a violent showdown between two spiders — and shows what looks like a couple dozen babies exploding from the spider under attack. It’s worth the (very creepy) watch.
Dr. Leonard Vincent, an entomologist and arachnid expert at Fullerton College in California, identified the “exploding” spider as a wolf spider.
“Female members of this family have their eggs sac attached to their spinnerets,” Vincent told The Huffington Post in an email, referring to the spiders’ silk-spinning organs. “Where the adult female goes, so does the egg sac.”
Duncan said that he didn’t know that one of the spiders was pregnant. And while the exploding baby spiders was a cool trick, it unfortunately didn’t help the spider — he said that the other spider killed the wolf spider, and then ate all of her babies.