Australia's latest weird wonder doesn't just catch its dinner—it slingshots it. Researchers in northern Queensland say they've found a tiny, as-yet-unnamed spider that builds a spring-loaded silk trap to launch a single prey species, the aggressive green tree ant, into its web at forces far beyond what jet pilots endure, the BBC reports. Nicknamed "ballista" after an ancient siege weapon, the spider spends hours at night weaving a cone of tensioned silk lines, then wrapping them in a thinner thread.
When a green ant bites the structure, the whole rig snaps, flinging the ant into a waiting web with what lead researcher Ajay Narendra calls "exceptionally high power." He says the ant is catapulted at "15 times the most extreme g-forces experienced by jet pilots." Narendra and other scientists from Macquarie University, who filmed the behavior with high-speed and infrared cameras, say that the spider targets no other prey, even when alternatives are offered, and suspect it may lace the snare with ant-attracting chemicals.
"Gram for gram, the webs store more energy and exert more power than any known biological catapult," researchers write at the Conversation. They believe the snare's power evolved to let the spider safely pick off dangerous ants, flinging them away from their trails before they can summon reinforcements. "This seems to be the only case where a spider's web is designed to catch a single prey species, and where the mechanism is triggered by the prey rather than by the predator," Narendra says.
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