\u201cTo be able to see the behaviour was absolutely breathtaking,\u201d Ajay Narendra, a biology professor at Australia’s Macquarie University and one of the study\u2019s lead researchers, told As It Happens host Nil K\u04e7ksal.<\/p>\n
The spider belongs to the Propostira genus, and has not yet received a formal species name.<\/p>\n
When ants fly<\/p>\n
Researcher Greg Anderson first observed the spider in 2022 when he witnessed a green tree ant suddenly fly through the air and get trapped in a web in a remote rainforest on Queensland\u2019s Cape York Peninsula.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The observation prompted a team from Macquarie University to travel from Sydney to northern Queensland to investigate in 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cTo be able to even find the spider was a needle in several haystacks,\u201d Narendra said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Using high-speed cameras, the team spent 10 days documenting the spiders’ unusual hunting strategy. The first attack they witnessed happened so quickly they failed to record it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cBy the time we blinked, the ant was caught in the web, so we had no idea what actually happened,\u201d Narendra said. \u201cLucky for us, nature and behaviours are quite repeatable.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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These spiders are nocturnal, and they hide under leaves until about 30 minutes after sunset, when they emerge to start building their traps. (Ajay Narendra et al.)<\/p>\n
The spiders are three to five millimetres long, and active exclusively at night. They spend their days hiding under leaves, and once the sun sets they spend up to four hours constructing an elaborate trap beneath their main web.\u00a0<\/p>\n
To set their traps, they descend roughly half a metre and attach between 15 and 60 silk tension lines to a lower anchor point, such as a leaf, branch or the forest floor, according to the study. Those lines are bundled into a taught cone-shaped structure, then wrapped in finer silk.<\/p>\n
Green tree ants then bite the cone and become stuck. As the ant struggles, the trap eventually detaches from its anchor point, releasing the stored tension and launching the insect nearly 30 centimetres into the air.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The ant lands directly in the spider’s main web, where the predator is waiting.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
WATCH | Australian spider catches green tree ant using unusual hunting tactic:<\/p>\n
The green tree ants were attracted to the trap within one minute of this final silk layer being placed, leading researchers to believe this silk may use pheromones to lure these ants, specifically.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cAs soon as it builds up that type of silk, it attracts only the green tree ants and no other ants,\u201d Narendra said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe went and released a whole bunch of different ants, which were also found on the tree at night on the same tree, and they just ignored it. They didn\u2019t care about it, which was fascinating.”<\/p>\n
Evolution to target prey<\/p>\n
Narendra suspects this hands-off approach is an evolutionary tactic to hunt green tree ants \u2014which are \u201cextremely formidable creatures\u201d and have \u201cstrength in numbers” \u2014 without ever coming into contact with them.<\/p>\n
The team plans to further study the spider silk to identify which pheromones, if any, are used in the prey specialization.<\/p>\n
Saad Bhamla, an associate professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder’s BioFrontiers Institute, says there could be a \u201cmuch simpler answer\u201d to how the spiders target their prey.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat if this ant is already so aggressive and territorial that as soon as a spider builds something in their vicinity, [green tree ants] are out there cleaning up?\u201d said Bhamla, who was not involved in the study.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnything is possible, but maybe these ants are just very vigilant compared to the other ants they tested.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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The ballista spider is three to five millimetres in length, and it stores energy in its web design similar to a loaded spring. (Ajay Narendra et al.)<\/p>\n
The launch occurs in about 42 milliseconds, and subjects the ants to nearly 15 times the G-force experienced by jet pilots, Narendra says.<\/p>\n