Arabic version: دراسة تُظهر أن الهنتسمان البني يتصدر اختبارات سرعة العناكب

Anyone who has seen a brown huntsman bolt across a wall will recognise their speed, and a new preprint study suggests those instincts are correct. The paper, published on bioRxiv and yet to be peer-reviewed, analysed the running speeds of many spider species and highlights the brown huntsman as particularly swift. The huntsman is a common sight across eastern Australia and is regularly found in homes, and the article notes they are harmless to humans.

According to ABC News, the study combined new experiments and past research to analyse 258 species of spiders. The preprint reports huntsman spiders can reach 3.59 metres per second, a top speed measured over very short periods. The paper’s authors caution the work is a preprint and further peer review is pending.

The UK and German research team carried out live experiments on 162 species, collecting most specimens from around England and Germany and sourcing some international species from pet stores. Spiders were placed in a box with grid paper on the bottom and recorded from above with a high-speed camera; a paintbrush or other blunt object was used to trigger running and capture speeds. That new dataset was compared with speed data from a further 96 species gathered from earlier research, including data from Dr Christofer Clemente’s 2021 work.

The study suggests the huntsman’s medium size and relatively long legs give it an advantage over both much smaller and much larger spiders. The article reports the huntsman measured had a mass of about 1 milligram and outpaced smaller species such as the money spider Maso sundevalli as well as much heavier species like the salmon pink bird eater (Lasiodora parahybana), reported at about 51 grams. Dr Clemente’s earlier investigations into spider locomotion and the hydraulics of leg extension helped inform comparisons, and he and the study authors note further work — including species identification with DNA testing and broader sampling — could reveal other very fast spiders or clarify exactly which huntsman species was recorded.