Jungle huntsman from Australia crowned world’s fastest spider
London: A huntsman spider from Queensland, Australia has taken the title of world’s fastest spider, clocking a top speed of nearly 3.6 metres per second.
Researchers led by Shreyas Kuchibhotla at Imperial College London tested 162 live spider species collected from the UK, North America, southern Europe and Australia, plus dozens from pet shops, to map arachnid sprinting ability.
Each spider was weighed and coaxed across A4 or A3 grid paper to record its speed. Most ran when gently touched with a paintbrush, though less cooperative species like tarantulas needed puffs of compressed air.
The team also included data from other research groups covering 96 more species. The fastest recorded was the 3-gram jungle huntsman spider (Heteropoda jugulans), clocked at 3.59 metres per second by Christofer Clemente and colleagues at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia.
That beats the previous record-holder, the Moroccan flic-flac spider (Cebrennus rechenbergi), which reaches 1.7 metres per second by rolling and tumbling downhill on sand dunes.
“The flic-flac is a special type of locomotion,” said Jonas Wolff at the University of Greifswald, Germany. “It is not running and it only works downhill on sand dunes”.
Kuchibhotla joked about the challenge of testing the spiders: “This project would have been over in a month if spiders could understand English”.
The study aims to better understand the biomechanics of spider movement across species, from ambush hunters to sprinters.
