How this Giant Bug KILLS Tarantulas

If you're a tarantula, your life kinda sucks. Giant parasitic wasps are constantly trying to convert you into a happy meal. Your best representation in media are crappy 50s B-movies and D-rate Marvel characters. And your only form of entertainment is waiting in a dark hole for some food to arrive. But even this simple pleasure can take a turn for the worse. Because there's a bug that tarantulas, and every other predator, needs to avoid at all costs. Because attacking this unassuming creature means instant death. To find one of these for myself and find out what makes it so deadly, I've traveled to the deserts of Arizona and to one of the prickliest habitats there is. All right, here we are in this forest of mesquite trees. And as my arm just experienced, these guys are very well defended. They have these huge spines and they really just coat this area. And this is the perfect place, of course, to find an animal called the giant mesquite bug. So we're gonna be combing along these branches, looking for large dark silhouettes, hopefully not impaling my arm. And with any luck, we'll find this tarantula killer. These bugs are so well defended that they don't really care about blending in or hiding whatsoever. So spotting a giant two-inch goth vampire-colored bug wasn't gonna be that much of a challenge. And sure enough, after a little bit of searching, I found a coven of them, the world's largest terrestrial bug. A statement that comes with a lot of asterisks. Slurping away on some seed pods. All right, this is what we've been looking for, the desert's own tarantula killer. Let's get this guy out of the tree. Look at that. I'm gonna try to make sure he doesn't fly off me. Look at the size of that bug. This is the giant mesquite bug, one of the most poisonous animals in this, oh, you see that trick shot? One of the most poisonous animals in this desert. And one that has almost no predators. Now just look at this thing. The first thing that sticks out to me, the legs on this guy. If this were a person, the squats it could do would be unfathomable. The quads on this thing. And it has a bunch of spines on those legs, so it probably helps grip onto the branches and make sure no giant wildlife YouTuber is able to pluck them from the trees. And visually, the scariest thing about this guy is look at that rostrum, that giant facial spike. Now, in a lot of its relatives, like assassin bugs, these bugs plunge them into the flesh of their prey. But this guy is an herbivore, and it actually sticks those into the seed pods of the mesquite tree to drink that fluid. Now, how does this thing kill a tarantula? Well, it's not a predator. It's not out there hunting them. But this is one of the most well-defended bugs. If anything wanted to get a bite of this guy, it would have to contend with one of the most potent toxins of any insect. When this guy's threatened, it'll spray out this clear liquid, and it's filled with cytotoxins and mutagens. And they will quickly, almost instantly, knock out any predator and even has the ability to kill things like tarantulas and praying mantises. So when this guy is up on this tree, he feels nice and safe that nothing is gonna be able to touch him. From trick-or-treating to avoiding taxes, some things are just easier to do as a kid. And for the mesquite bug, that includes killing its predators. These old geezers probably can't even kill a house spider, let alone a tarantula. But it's when they're psychedelically colored babies that they possess the deadly cytotoxin, which has been shown in lab tests to kill all sorts of predatory bugs, including some of the desert's heaviest hitters. But when they grow up and get too big for these predators to eat, their chemical cocktail changes, becoming a mix of hexyl acetate, hexanil, and hexanol, which, funnily enough, are the active ingredients in apple-scented perfume. It might smell great to us, but it's repulsive to birds, making this one of the few creatures whose defense completely changes as it enters a new part of the food chain. Truly a bizarre bug. So the giant mesquite bug, one of the most well-defended insects on Earth, and one with a defense that almost nothing can overcome. Super cool to find these guys. I've been looking for them forever, and it's awesome to get one in front of the camera. I hope you guys enjoyed the video, and stay tuned for more new and exciting insect-related content, and I'll see you guys next time.