Trap-Jaw Spiders Have Lightning-Fast Biting Reflexes

While spiders are definitely some of the creepiest crawlers in nature, even the biggest arachnophobes can’t deny that they are in fact very interesting. And it’s exactly that feature that makes them so disturbing to some. As humans, we are used to certain biology or anatomical structure. If that structure is completely alien to our own, we start feeling uncomfortable.

And that’s exactly why arachnophobia is so common. But their looks aren’t the only things that make these arachnids so fascinating. In fact, many of them have developed some features that are so strange that many haven’t even figured them out yet. Discovered by a single researcher from the Smithsonian, trap-jaw spiders have lightning-fast biting reflexes.

Having absolutely nothing else out of the ordinary, spiders from the Mecysmaucheniidae family have developed a particular feature that puts them on the list of the world’s fastest animals. At least fourteen species in the family have developed these superarachnid powers, able to snap their jaws shut so fast that they require a high-speed camera to be properly perceived.

Surprisingly, the discovery was made by a single member of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, one Hannah Wood. Always having a fascination with spiders and travelling, Wood encountered the critters while she was a grade student and studied them ever since.

According to her, she even had some one hundred trap-jaw spider in her tiny apartment after first discovering them in Chile. As she noticed the impressive speed with which they closed their jaw, Wood started recording them with increasingly more performant cameras, eventually realizing that she needed high-speed cameras capable of capturing up to 40,000 frames per second in order to properly discern their movements.

This type of behavior had been previously observed in some species of ants, but never in an arachnid. And like I mentioned before, multiple species in the family have the same capacity, only at different speeds. And the differences in speed are quite impressive, to say the least.

According to the researchers, the fastest of the creatures can close their jaws more than one hundred times faster than the slowest members of the family. While that isn’t particularly precise, it’s the best measurement the researchers could get without superior equipment. Still, a lot of further study is going to go into analyzing and better understanding these otherwise drab-looking creatures.

Even more interesting is the fact that the spiders’ muscles can, under no circumstances, be singularly responsible for the lightning-quick movements. That means that the creatures have developed a particular set of structural mechanisms responsible for their “superpower”, mechanisms that are still being studied intensely.

Image source: Wikimedia