Researchers at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History have discovered some tiny Mecysmaucheniid “trap-jaw” spiders can snap their jaws so fast, that they needed to be captured at 40,000 frames a second by a high speed camera.
Advertisement
To do this, the diminutive spiders had to evolve high-powered jaws and the ability to close them at incredible speeds, according to a new study in Current Biology.
Known as trap-jaw spiders or Chilarchaea quellon, the creatures belong to a superfamily with a freaky anatomy that has evolved to make them more effective when hunting. After her first encounter with a trap-jaw spider in Chile, she noticed that they would sit with their jaw-like chelicerae open and ready to snap. Biologists have, so far, been unable to explain how the spiders are able to deliver such a powerful bite to their prey, including insects.
But in the lab, the bigger, slower trap-jaw spiders have happily eaten flies and myriad other things, whereas Wood could only convince the ones with power amplification to feed on springtails – a kind of arthropod that propels itself from the ground at high speed.
While the findings might not make real superpowers possible for humans, they could have other implications for future technology. This ability differed from species to species, the fastest snapping its jaw in only 12 thousandths of a second or 100 times faster than the slowest, which wasn’t no slowpoke either. They distinguished the species by genetic sequencing, and used a particle accelerator to generate 3-D models of the spiders, which were too tiny to dissect by hand.
Instead, other structural mechanisms must be involved that allow trap-jaw spiders to store energy required to produce their high-powered, lightning-quick movements. “They don’t seem to have specialised in any particular prey and have been reported to feed on a range of insects and spiders”.
Study’s lead researcher Hannah Wood, a Smithsonian scientist, and the team found that high-speed, power-amplified strikes have evolved at least four different times within the Mecysmaucheniid family.
Mecysmaucheniidae spiders are to be found only in New Zealand and parts of South America.
Wood declared that the research she and her colleagues undertook showed how little scientists know about spiders.
But the trap-jaw spider doesn’t have the fastest strike on record – that honour goes to another spider species, Zearchaea, which also lives in New Zealand.
Mecysmaucheniidae is a relatively small family of spiders with 25 described species in seven genera. “Somewhere, they’re storing that energy, and our next task is to find out where”.
Mecysmauchenius spider new species, female. “These spiders looked unusual, so I wanted to understand what was going on with them”, lead author Hannah Woods told IBTimes UK.
Advertisement
“Many of our greatest innovations take their inspiration from nature”, Wood said. “Studying these spiders may give us clues that allow us to design tools or robots that move in novel ways”.
