Wicked Nature!

So Friday during home school the girls and I were outside on a little break swinging.  I was looking at my plants and checking on our garden orb spider - a giant yellow and black beast who I have "allowed" to live in my cannas.  He's far away from the house and doesn't leave the web - good spider.

Anyways, I saw some movement and thought he might have caught a bug so when I investigated I saw he had caught a praying mantis!  I couldn't believe that this spider could do that and was interested to see how he was going to wrap it up?

At this point I thought the spider had the mantis.

After a few more seconds of observation, I figured out that the spider had in fact lost the battle, and the praying mantis had caught the spider! Wicked!

Yep, definitely the mantis winning!

The praying mantis then proceeded to chomp his way through this enormous spider bite by bite.

It was wild to see him chewing on a leg - looked like he had a toothpick sticking out of his mouth!

The girls having an impromptu science lesson.

Let me say, after careful observation of these two creatures, praying mantises are bad @#$!