Speedy spiders. Aussie arachnid is the Gout Gout of the garden!

Adam Spencer
23 hours ago
4 min read

They came, they ran (sort of) and a hairy huntsman flogged them. The world's fastest spider is an Aussie.

(First published on my Substack where you can get #NerdNews, marvellous maths and general geekery.)

("Speedy Spider": created by the author via imagen)

The fastest spider on Earth is Australian, obviously.

In a week when Queensland souls are still aching, Maroons fans can take some solace. While the Blues have triumphed in State of Origin, one Queenslander is a winner today. The world’s fastest spider comes from north of the border.

A brown huntsman has just been clocked with the fastest running speed ever measured in a spider.

Pure pace.

The magic number is 3.59 metres per second. The top speed recorded, for a fraction of a second, by Heteropoda cervina/jugulans, the brown or jungle huntsman common along Australia's east coast, in a new study led by Imperial College London and the University of Greifswald.

Our latest Aussie legend outpaces the previous claimant, the Moroccan flic-flac spider (Cebrennus rechenbergi), at about 1.7 m/s. Though strictly speaking the flic-flac cheats. It doesn’t run, it cartwheels down sand dunes.

Now there’s an Olympic final I’d be glued to!

On your (258!) marks.

This wasn’t exactly an Olympic stadium set-up here. In fact it was gloriously low-tech.

The spider-speedsters were placed on grid paper, then convinced to careen by a ticklish touch on the abdomen with a paintbrush, pencil, or puff (of compressed air).

For any keen to escape, the walls of the ‘track’ were smeared with paraffin.

Overhead cameras captured the action as the team measured 162 species, hailing from London and Greifswald, North America, southern Europe, Australia and various local pet suppliers.

These results were stacked up against the published data for another 96 species, including earlier huntsman work by Dr Christofer Clemente at the University of the Sunshine Coast.

So the field spanned 258 species across 64 families. This comprises almost half of the 139 known spider families.

When it came to recruiting the world champion, it’s fair to say this was no elite athlete identification program.

"I just went out into the backyard with a head torch." — Dr Christofer Clemente, University of the Sunshine Coast.

Now there could be a faster spider in the remaining untested species, and this result is only a bioRxiv preprint, yet to be peer reviewed.

But after last Wednesday at Suncorp Stadium, on behalf of all Queenslanders, bugger that, we’ll take the win!

Bigger ain’t better.

The bigger the spider, perhaps the scarier, maybe the hairier, but not necessarily pacier.

Some juicy stats: the slowest spider recorded was one of the smaller ones. The money spider Maso sundevalli, weighing in at around a mere milligram, was comfortable shuffling along at 0.018 m/s (or 65 metres per hour!).

The big boy of the field was the salmon pink birdeater Lasiodora parahybana, a 52-gram tarantula. Old Lasi-P could muster a mere 0.4 m/s. It was outpaced by spiders a hundred times lighter.

The Aussie huntsman that won tips the scales at a middling three grams. Not miniscule. Not massive. The big H seems to occupy an intermediate zone where the physics of muscle and limb happens to line up nicely.

"The fastest animals are neither the largest nor the smallest, but of intermediate size." —Kuchibhotla et al., bioRxiv preprint, 2026.

We see this phenomenon across the animal kingdom, wherein the fastest land animal is a cheetah, not an elephant or a mouse.

She’s got legs. She knows how to use them.

While outright speed hogs the headlines, we should also look at leg-length.

Longer legs relative to body meant faster running, enough to account for a fivefold spread in speed. Ground-hunting spiders that chase their food, huntsman included, ran on average about twice as fast as size alone would predict.

Web-builders that let silk do the catching had less reason to sprint, and it showed.

Think about how your legs work when you run. Or when you last ran. Muscles can only pull, never push. Even when you bench press, the muscle is pulling on bone, and the bone does the pushing.

So when you run, your hamstring pulls your lower leg up, and your quadricep pulls it straight again. And off you go.

It is two muscles pulling one joint in opposite directions.

Well spiders are all hamstring, no quad. At the two big leg joints, the hinge sits up top, so any muscle you add on there can only ever pull the leg closed. Give a spider a quad and it turns out to be just another hamstring.

So to straighten its legs, a spider squeezes its own chest. Pressure spikes, fluid floods into the leg cavities, and the joints pop open. It does not extend its legs. It inflates them.

The pressure we are talking about here is ridiculous. A sprinting tarantula runs its legs at around 217 mmHg, nearly double your blood pressure, and peaks near 480.

In us, that is not a workout. That is an ambulance.

It also explains why every dead spider you have ever seen is curled in a ball. Not agony. No pump. With no pressure left to push them out, the flexors win by default and the legs fold in.

Aussie Aussie Aussie …

So the next time you see a huntsman do that skittering dash across the wall, or drop out from behind the car’s sun visor and onto dad’s lap, you are watching one speedy spider.

Indeed, one of the finest sprinters biology has produced.