5 Terrifyingly Advanced Ways Animals Know How to Kill

Whether you know it or not, humanity is fighting a war right now, and we are losing. Badly. That's because this fight is with Mother Nature herself, and while you're over there on the other side of this screen, microwaving tea and knitting tiny sweaters, that bitch is out there building biological superweapons 24/7. If all the world is a stage and we are but its players, then this show is called You Did What to My Wife? these things are Liam Neeson and you're the Eastern European terrorist who dies from getting repeatedly stabbed with his own frozen fear-urine.
Gladiator Spiders


"Screw you guys, I'm taking my net and I'm going home." The gladiator spider then suspends itself from a single strand of silk above the forest floor and, wielding its net between its forelegs, it waits. When some poor unsuspecting insect walks beneath it, the gladiator spider springs into action, hurling the web-net over its hapless victim
The Iberian Newt


Tentacled Sea Snakes


Well, duh. It's a snake, after all; it's not going to use its freaky super powers to give you the Keno numbers. The tentacled snake subsists mostly on fish, which is a tougher life than it sounds because most of their prey has a built-in reaction to danger called a C-start. Basically, fish can sense sound waves in the water, and if they match certain criteria, a controlled muscle spasm kicks in automatically, sending them swimming at top speed away from the potential predator. The tentacled snake has actually evolved to exploit this, however. It will wait until a fish closes within striking distance, but it won't strike. First, it motions with its midsection in a precise way that mimics the prime "danger criteria," causing the fish to C-start (, this is an involuntary reaction on the fish's part). When the fish does start, it flips around in the blink of an eye and flees ... right into the snake's waiting jaws. To recap: The tentacled snake has figured out the evolutionary mechanism by which fish perceive danger, and then constructed an elaborate, biological false alarm to send them scurrying into its own mouth. But if the C-start happens faster than the eye can see, how does the snake actually catch the damn things once they're headed in the right direction? Simple: It doesn't strike at the prey directly, it strikes at where it knows the prey will go
Tarantula Hawk


When the guy whose job it is to take the worst pain ever starts describing his feelings like the tagline to a horror movie, that shit has as astronomically high likelihood of being real. And while it is noted that the tarantula hawk is "relatively docile" and "rarely stings without provocation," don't you dare take any of that premature comfort. Because there's also this: The tarantula hawk is one of the few insects that get drunk recreationally. It often gets off on fermented fruit juice for kicks, sometimes to the point that " fly around a bit unsteadily." So even if they're not actively out to kill you, just : Somewhere out there in nature, somebody's drunk driving a tiny helicopter with a 1/3-inch blade instead of a bumper, coated in the most painful thing on the planet.
Blanket Octopus


"Did you say somethin'? Cause my poison whip here, it thinks it heard somethin', and brother? It's got reeeaaaal good hearing." That's right: The blanket octopus actively seeks out and dis one of the most dangerous creatures in the sea just to use its limbs as weapons. That's like you waking up one day to find you've evolved an immunity to slash wounds, then immediately leaping out of bed and sprinting off into the woods so you can use your newfound abilities to hunt down a grizzly bear, rip its claws off and start beating wolves with them.
You can buy Robert's other book, Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody: The Terrifyingly Real Ways the World Wants You Dead, or follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
For more from Brockway, check out 5 Lovable Animals You Didn't Know Are Secretly Terrifying and The 5 Current Genetic Experiments Most Likely to Destroy Humanity.