I made a project for it, but I am not here to discuss that. Rather, I just want to discuss the phenomenon in general. Vertebrates are seen usually as the top of the food chain. But there are a surprising number of incidents where arthropods kill and eat vertebrates.
A review of over 1,300 incidents found frogs to be the most common prey item, and spiders the most common predators. Some of my personal favorite recorded instances is a katydid eat a passerine bird
Technically this might have been a defensive attack rather than a purely predatory one, but considering how land crabs are known to be predators of reptiles and birds, I don’t think it’s out of the question that this crab at the mongoose later.
So, have any of you personally observed incidents of arthropod predation on vertebrates? I unfortunately have not
There are several species of frogbane beetles; the grubs pretend to be prey for frogs (as many carabid grubs actually are), then when the frog flicks its tongue out, the grub jumps sideways, latches onto the frog, and sucks it dry. The adults also eat frogs. I’ve never seen this myself, but Gil Wizen studies them in Israel, and I once found something by Gerardo Garcia in which a frogbane grub attacked a mantella (Malagasy poisonous frog).
the american arachnological society has published a few relevant papers in recent years, including one about spiders eating snakes and another about spiders eating frogs
There are a bunch of examples of this behavior on iNat (e.g., https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/33543058). If you look at all “Mantodea” and sort by “Faves”, a number of them will come up in the first couple of pages. I raised Chinese Mantises in college and I can tell you, they will basically grab anything up to the size of a hummingbird.
