Remember a couple weeks ago when you noticed people keep downvoting your comments for no reason, and I suggested it was because they recognize your username?

I know about the types of communities you are talking about, but there is a difference between people who purposefully put animals together to cause them to kill each other for entertainment and taking striking pictures of natural predation.

I just watched a video of an Australian water rat eat the heart of a toad, as an adaptation to prey on invasive species with mostly toxic organs. That is pretty cool, and the shock value helps with the educational aspect.

There’s a difference between that and “let’s put a snake and a spider in the same confined environment to watch them kill each other for fun.” Or god, the monkey torture people.

Animals eat each other, and learning about them will require confronting this fact. I think this photo is educational, not lurid. Most people know very little about spiders, and I hope that my posting this picture got people to think more about the natural world. It is shocking, it does provoke a visceral reaction, but it also prompts questions. I am probably going to use it as a phenomenon to explore the next time I work with a student on biology.

That's...dumb.

It really is

where's the gore