{"id":791081,"date":"2026-07-09T18:28:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T18:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/791081\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T18:28:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T18:28:09","slug":"this-huge-hairy-legged-australian-arachnid-may-be-the-fastest-spider-on-the-planet-australia-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/791081\/","title":{"rendered":"This huge hairy-legged Australian arachnid may be the fastest spider on the planet | Australia news"},"content":{"rendered":"

If arachnophobes were not frightened enough by the horrific ability of Australia\u2019s huntsman spiders to drag dead mice up the sides of fridges<\/a>, they now have another reason.<\/p>\n

They might be the fastest spiders on the planet.<\/p>\n

One member of the huntsman family, the brown huntsman Heteropoda jugulans, was clocked as the quickest of more than 250 spider species analysed by a team of scientists in the UK and Germany.<\/p>\n

Reaching a peak speed of 3.59 metres per second (13km\/h or 8mph), the humble and hairy-legged huntsman appears to be faster than the current world record-holder<\/a>, the Moroccan flic-flac spider and its comparatively pedestrian 1.7 m\/s (they don\u2019t so much run, as tumble down hill to reach that speed).<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The scientists collected 162 different spider species \u2013 mostly from around London and the German city of Greifswald, but also from North America, southern Europe and Australia \u2013 and then measured their running speeds using cameras and gridded paper as the running track. The research has been submitted to a scientific journal.<\/p>\n

They also added to their analysis other studies that had measured spider speed and, crucially, that included research supervised<\/a> by Dr Christofer Clemente, an evolutionary biomechanist at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland.<\/p>\n

Clemente\u2019s research was originally published in 2021 and aimed to understand the unique way that spiders get about.<\/p>\n

But rather than go searching for what he thought would be the quickest spiders, Clemente said he just grabbed the ones that were the easiest to get.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese were just spiders I found in the back yard,\u201d Clemente said. \u201cI could just go out with my head torch and see them on the grass.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am interested in how different animals of different sizes move and whether muscle might limit the speed at which animals can run,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSpiders don\u2019t move using just muscle \u2013 they use a combination of muscles to retract their limbs and hydraulic pressure to push them outwards.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s a completely different way of powering locomotion to other animals.\u201d<\/p>\n

The brown huntsman only lives along Australia\u2019s east coast<\/a> and is a common site in homes in south-east Queensland.<\/p>\n

They are about the size of a hand and while they are venomous they very rarely bite humans and when they do, the effects are mild.<\/p>\n

While the 3.59 m\/s was the peak speed recorded by the huntsman, Clemente said this was only reached for a fraction of a second. The huntsman\u2019s average sustained speed was closer to 2 m\/s.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s still really fast,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

When it comes to running in the animal kingdom, he said generally there appeared to be a \u201csweet spot\u201d between having legs and muscles that were long but \u201cnot so big that you have to support this huge mass\u201d.<\/p>\n

His hunch was that huntsmans \u201cmight be close to the sweet spot\u201d for the best spider body type for speed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re not too big and not too small, but we haven\u2019t done the science on that yet,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Dr Jonas Wolff, of the University of Greifswald in Germany and one of the lead authors of the new research, said it was the broadest comparative study of running speed in spiders ever conducted.<\/p>\n

Running speed can determine how spiders interact with the environment, how far they disperse and \u201cwhich ecological niche they occupy\u201d.<\/p>\n

One key finding was that \u201cit was not the largest species that ran the fastest\u201d and that spiders that caught their prey in webs were not necessarily slower than hunters like the huntsman.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead, the data indicates there is a threshold in body mass, after which running speed drops due to mechanical constraints in muscle physiology and the spider\u2019s body plan.\u201d<\/p>\n

So is the brown huntsman the fastest spider in the world?<\/p>\n

\u201cI would not rule out there are faster huntsman species than this one out there, which have not been tested yet,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If arachnophobes were not frightened enough by the horrific ability of Australia\u2019s huntsman spiders to drag dead mice…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":791082,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":["post-791081","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791081","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=791081"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791081\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/791082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=791081"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=791081"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=791081"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}