🌅 Australia Is Home to the World’s Fastest Spider

SOURCE

Kuchibhotla et al. (2026)

WHAT TO KNOW

• Researchers at Imperial College London in the U.K. ranked 258 spider species by their top speed, finding Australia’s brown huntsman led the way at 3.59 meters per second, or about 8 miles per hour (for context, the average jogging speed of most humans is around 4-6 miles per hour). The spider, which is found exclusively along Australia’s eastern coast, weighs around three grams and is about the size of a human hand. The study was published as a preprint, meaning it has yet to be peer reviewed.

WHY IT MATTERS

• Unlike many aspects of physical performance, running speed doesn’t directly correlate with an animal’s size (e.g., cheetahs, which are considered mid-size animals, are among the fastest creatures on Earth). Rather, it’s the limits the animals’ body size and anatomy put on muscle energy that matters most. Spiders also don’t solely rely on muscles to move, instead using a combination of muscles and hydraulic pressure to extend and retract their limbs, creating locomotion in a completely different manner than most other animals.

CONNECT THE DOTS

• The present study suggests the brown huntsman has dethroned the Moroccan flic-flac as the world’s fastest spider. Previous research found the Moroccan flic-flac, known scientifically as Cebrennus rechenbergi, can reach a top speed of roughly 2 meters per second, however, it gets there by essentially tumbling downhill rather than running. The authors of the present study believe there may be other species of huntsman spiders out there that are faster than the brown huntsman, calling for future work to identify and test the speeds of other huntsman species.