This huge, hairy-legged Australian arachnid may be the fastest spider in the world | Spiders
If arachnophobes weren’t freaked out enough by the terrifying ability of Australia’s huntsman spiders to drag dead mice to the sides of refrigerators, they now have another reason to.
They may be the fastest spiders on the planet.
Brown hunter, a member of the hunter family Heteropoda jugulans, It was determined to be the fastest of more than 250 spider species analyzed by a team of scientists in the UK and Germany.
Reaching a top speed of 3.59 meters per second (13 km/h or 8 mph), the humble, hairy-legged predator appears to be faster than other predators. current world record holderThe Moroccan Flic-Flac spider and its relatively pedestrian speed is 1.7 m/s (to reach this speed, they do not run very far, they roll down the hill).
The scientists collected 162 different species of spiders, mostly from around London and Greifswald, Germany, but also from North America, Southern Europe and Australia, and then measured their running speeds using cameras and checkered paper as running tracks. The research was submitted to a scientific journal.
They also included other studies measuring spider speed in their analysis, most notably including: research audited Evolutionary biomechanics expert Dr. from the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland. By Christofer Clemente.
Clemente’s research was first published in 2021 and aimed to understand the spiders’ unique way of moving.
But instead of hunting for what he thought were the fastest spiders, Clemente said he caught the ones that were easiest to get hold of.
“These were just spiders I found in the backyard,” Clemente said. “I could go out with my head torch and see them on the grass.
“I’m interested in how different animals of different sizes move and whether muscles can limit the speed at which animals can run,” he said.
“Spiders don’t move using just muscles; they use a combination of muscles to pull their limbs back and hydraulic pressure to push them out.
“This is a completely different way of enhancing the locomotion of other animals.”
brown hunter lives only on the east coast of Australia It is a common sight in homes in south-east Queensland.
They are about the size of a hand, and although they are venomous, they very rarely bite humans, and when they do, the effects are mild.
Although the fastest speed recorded by the Hunter was 3.59 m/s, Clemente said this was only achieved by a fraction of a second. The average sustained speed of the hunter was close to 2 m/s.
“This is still too fast,” he said.
When it comes to running in the animal kingdom, he said, there seems to be a “sweet spot” between having legs in general and muscles that are long but “not so big that you have to support this huge mass.”
His hunch was that hunters “might be near the sweet spot” for the best spider body type in terms of speed.
“They’re not too big or too small, but we haven’t done any scientific studies on this yet,” he said.
from the University of Greifswald in Germany and one of the lead authors of the new study. Jonas Wolff said this was the largest comparative study ever conducted on running speed in spiders.
Running speed can determine how spiders interact with the environment, how far they disperse and “what ecological niche they occupy.”
One of the key findings was that “it is not the largest species that runs the fastest” and that spiders that capture their prey in webs are not necessarily slower than predators such as predators.
“Instead, the data suggest that there is a threshold in body mass, after which running speed decreases due to mechanical constraints in muscle physiology and the spider’s body plan.”
So is the brown hunter the fastest spider in the world?
“I cannot rule out that there are faster predator species than this that have not yet been tested,” he said.
