This Crafty Spider Doesn't Have Venom...But It Does Have a 'Slingshot'

Image courtesy of Judy Gallagher, CC BY 2.0.




Joel Kontinen

Spiders can be fast. just a reminder of how one species - triangle weaver spider (Hyptiotes cavatus) does it.

It uses "external power amplification” to do the trick. “Basically, an animal uses an external device (in this case, the spider's web) to store energy, like a person storing energy in a bow with a pulled-back arrow. Once the energy is released, the spider is flung forward like a slingshot, greatly exceeding the speeds at which the arachnid could otherwise travel.”

Then it says how they did the trick:

"To study the critter, the scientists collected wild triangle weaver spiders, which are native to the United States and Canada, and brought them to the lab, where the spiders were housed in terrariums and filmed with high-speed videos as they hunted prey.

Daniel Maksuta, a doctoral student studying polymer science at the University of Akron in Ohio says. "It really works out too. [If] the prey is massive in comparison to the web and the spider, the web kind of just flings around it. So, that's how [the prey] gets all tangled up."

The maneuver is so fast, the spider can be hurled forward at accelerations of about 772 meters squared (2,535 feet/second squared).

Animals can do all kinds of tricks. For instance, the tiny crustaceans can live in the depths of the sea. And, frog choruses inspire wireless sensor networks.

Thus, biomimetrics or biomimicry or copying amazing design seen in nature has recently become a success.

Source:

Geggel, Laura. 2019.This Crafty Spider Doesn't Have Venom...But It Does Have a 'Slingshot' Live Science (16.5.).