New science from Australia reveals a spider that doesn’t just wait. It flings prey into the sky. The target? Green tree ants. Only green tree ants.
The force is staggering. Researchers measured accelerations up to 1360 m/s². That’s 130 Gs. Humans blackout around 5G. This spider launches bugs at lethal speed.
“We pushed the cameras to 5,000-7,000 fps,” says Ajay Narendra, a researcher at Macquarie University. “I’ve never had to go that high.”
Greg Anderson from the QIMR Berghofer institute saw the first signs back in 2022. He watched an ant blur into a strange web in far-north Queensland. But he had no gear fast enough to catch the moment. Just a ghostly blur. Ballistic motion. Nothing else.
Enter Narendra and his colleague Pranav Joshi. They spent ten days in early 2023 tracking these nocturnal hunters. The spiders remain unnamed in literature for now, though they belong to the Propostira genus.
The researchers call them ballista spiders. Named after the Roman weapon. A crossbow that hurls heavy rocks. This version uses silk and tension instead of stone.
The process is deliberate. Daytime brings hiding on the undersides of leaves. Dusk brings construction. It takes hours—up to four. The spider bundles 15 to 60 tension lines against a leaf, creating a tight cone.
Then the bait.
A chemical trigger specific to green tree ants. Not others. Just those aggressive greens. They smell the bait and attack with mandibles. But here is the twist. The silk is sticky. Glue-like.
“I suspect there’s a lot of stickiness,” Narendra notes. “The ants get stuck. Their jaws lock shut. They can’t let go.”
So the ant pulls.
The tension snaps.
The anchor releases.
The cone whips backward, flinging the insect nearly 30 cm into the air. The ant gets tangled in the main web above. Gone.
Why do this?
Lifting the meal away from the ground protects the spider. Ant colonies retaliate. Hard. By launching the food into the web canopy, the spider avoids a counter-attack. It’s safe feeding.
Building such an elaborate trap for every meal sounds like overkill. But green tree ants are reliable. Consistent. If the spider gets hungry?
It builds a trap. Food comes.
What other tricks are we missing? 🕸️
Journal reference: Current Biology. DOI: 10.1019/j.cub.206.04.006
