The trap-jaw spider Chilarchaea quellonSMITHSONIAN, HANNAH WOODThe bites of tiny trap-jaw spiders pack a powerful punch. The jaws of these diminutive arachnids can chomp down faster than those of any known spider, Hannah Wood, curator of spiders at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and colleagues reported yesterday (April 7) in Current Biology.
“These are the fastest-known arachnids so far,” Wood told Smithsonian, referring to spiders in the Mecysmaucheniid family, which are native to New Zealand and southern South America. Wood named them “trap-jaw” spiders because their mechanism for catching prey—like that of so-called trap-jaw ants—resembles a mouse trap clamping shut.
For the present study, Wood and colleagues collected 26 species of the spiders in Chile—many of them smaller than a grain of rice, according to The Washington Post. The researchers filmed the bites of 14 species with a high-speed camera. 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.
The fastest spider studied (Zearchaea sp4) could shut its trap ...
