One evening in the jungles of Guyana, the entomologist and photographer Piotr Naskręcki suddenly rattled his feet. He had gone alone on one of his usual evening walks in the jungle with the flashlight as his only light source.
Actually, he was hunting for locusts, and he had therefore turned off the light so as not to scare anything away and to be able to better listen to the small insects.
When he suddenly sensed something larger around his feet, he first assumed it must be a smaller mammal.
"When I turned on the light, I could not really understand what it was I was looking at," Piotr Naskręcki
Instead of a pouch rat, in the light cone from his flashlight suddenly sat a bird spider that was a good portion larger than his own outstretched hand.
The spider was a giant specimen of the South American Goliath bird spider that can grow up to 30 inches in diameter and weigh up to 170 grams - about as much as a small puppy.
The spider had two centimeters long fangs
As Piotr Naskręcki approached the spider, he started rubbing his hind legs against his hind body. At first, he actually thought it looked cute.
"But it was only until a cloud of stinging hair hit my eyes and made them itch and run in water for several days," writes Piotr Naskręcki on his blog.
The spider then lifted itself up on its hind legs and extended its two-centimeter-long fangs, which are strong enough to pierce a mouse skull. Although the bite is not fatal to humans, it is still extremely painful.