New Spider Speed Study: Huntsman Is Fastest of 258 Species

If spiders already make your skin crawl, you may prefer not to read on.

A new study examines the sprinting speeds of 258 spider species, and the quickest among them could easily catch someone walking.

The fastest spider in the study

To find out which species could scurry fastest between two points, the research team used a laboratory setup with a camera and grid paper mounted on a plastic tray or metal sheet.

A huntsman spider from the genus Heteropoda, native to Queensland, Australia, took first place. It reached almost 3.6 metres per second – a little over 8 miles per hour (around 12.9 km/h). That comfortably exceeds the average human jogging speed of 4–6 miles per hour (around 6.4–9.7 km/h).

The research was more than a simple race, however. The scientists also wanted to understand how evolution and anatomy influence spiders’ running speeds: in other words, which body shapes and characteristics best support a rapid scuttle.

"Strong running performance, after accounting for both body size and shared ancestry, was associated with relatively longer legs and, to a lesser extent, ecological guild, but not with leg slenderness or a preference for inverted versus upright locomotion," the researchers write in their preprint, which is awaiting peer review.

The Moroccan flic-flac spider (Cebrennus rechenbergi) holds the official world record for the fastest spider. But the cartwheeling movement C. rechenbergi uses when startled is not technically the same kind of running tested in this study.

The flic-flac spider’s average top speed is 1.7 metres per second, illustrating the gap in our understanding of spider speeds that the new research has filled.

How spider size and leg shape affect speed

Bigger spiders were generally faster, the team found, although some species bucked the trend. The tiny orange goblin spider (Oonops pulcher) weighs about 30,00 times less than the record-breaking huntsman, yet was just 18 times slower.

That finding builds on earlier research suggesting that the fastest animals are often neither the smallest nor the largest. Instead, what matters most is how body size and anatomy constrain the energy available to muscles.

"A cheetah, say, comfortably outruns most similarly sized dogs," David Labonte, an animal biomechanist at Imperial College London, told New Scientist journalist James Woodford.

"This is, of course, because its lifestyle has made this speed beneficial, but it is still dictated by physics."

As well as finding that larger spiders were generally quicker, the researchers found that longer legs were important for speed – more so than leg slenderness.

Spider speed across the family tree

The researchers measured scuttling speeds or obtained published data for 258 arachnid species. They then compared the speeds across the arachnid family tree to examine how different spider lineages performed.

Ground-hunting spiders were the fastest for their size, probably because they spend considerable time actively pursuing prey. Species that are newer in evolutionary terms also showed the greatest variation in speed.

"Macroevolutionary patterns of running performance thus reflect not only variation in body size, but also size-specific leg morphology, ecological differentiation and phylogenetic history," write the researchers.

This is the most comprehensive catalogue of spider speeds produced so far. Although it may make some people more wary when they encounter a spider, it also provides an important look at how physical capacity and genetic history together shape a species’ traits.

The study closes by noting that, "in an age in which machine learning and artificial intelligence are coming to dominate research across the sciences", it remains important to prioritise real-world experiments and data.

"Only with such data at hand will we be able to eventually drive major advances in our understanding of the factors that shape locomotor performance in spiders, other arthropods, and animals more generally," the researchers conclude.

The research is available on the bioRxiv preprint server ahead of peer review.

Rachel Garner fact-checked this article and Clare Watson edited it. We take pride in our process, but we are only human. Please let us know if you find a mistake.