06/25/2026
- a new way of web slinging
In the rainforests near Cooktown, in Queensland, Australia, scientists have found a spider that hunts in a way no one had documented before. They have nicknamed it the ballista spider, after the ancient catapult, and the name is well earned.
Most spiders wait for prey to get stuck in a web. This one built itself a weapon.
The spider's target is the green tree ant, an aggressive insect that bites hard and is dangerous to take on directly. So instead of grappling with them, the spider engineered a trap. It rigs a cone of silk into a spring-loaded sling, holds it under tension, and waits.
When an ant comes to investigate and bites the trap, the whole thing releases. The ant is violently slingshotted off its feet and flung into the center of the web, where the spider is waiting to finish the job.
The launch hits roughly 140 times the force of gravity. For comparison, a fighter pilot can withstand around 9 times the force of gravity before blacking out, meaning this spider hits its prey with about 15 times the g-force a trained human could ever survive.
It is one of the only known animals to hunt using stored mechanical energy like this, building and loading a tool rather than relying on its own body.
