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Australian Ballista Spider Fires Silk Like a Crossbow to Snare Prey Mid-Air

Biologists at the University of Queensland have described a new spider species, Arachnoballista queenslandica, that uses a spring-loaded silk launching mechanism to catapult sticky capture threads at flying insects up to 12 centimetres away, far beyond the reach of any known web-building strategy. High-speed video revealed that the spider pre-tensions a silk strand anchored to a trigger hair on its front leg; when a nearby insect disturbs the air, the hair releases the mechanism and fires the thread in under two milliseconds. The research, published this week in Current Biology, sheds new light on the evolution of silk weaponisation in arachnids.