Australian Ballista Spider Uses a Spring-Loaded Trap to Snare Aggressive Ants
Researchers say the trap flings green tree ants nearly 30 centimeters into the air with forces up to 130 times gravity.
- Researchers have discovered a new spider species in Far North Queensland that uses a powerful, spring-like conical snare to launch green tree ants into its web. Dubbed the ballista spider, the arachnid represents a uniquely specialized hunting mechanism.
- Macquarie University researcher Ajay Narendra noted the spider targets only the aggressive green tree ant, Oecophylla smaragdina, likely evolving this specialized trap to lift prey away from ant trails and avoid dangerous counterattacks from the colony.
- The spider spends up to four hours creating a conical snare with up to 60 vertical tension lines. When triggered, the trap catapults the ant at accelerations of 1367 metres per second squared, launching prey more than 30 centimetres upwards.
- Spider taxonomist Greg Anderson first observed the arachnid in 2022; researchers Ajay Narendra and Pranav Joshi studied it in early 2023. Their findings, published in Current Biology in 2026, detail how the spider uses chemical lures to trigger the snare.
- Narendra explained this mechanism is likely the only case where a web targets a single prey species, with the trigger controlled by prey rather than predator. The snare represents a highly specialized ambush strategy securing a reliable food source.
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15 Articles
Snatching Bait with 130 Times the Acceleration of Gravity… Spider Shooting a ‘Ballista’ with Its Web
When an ant bit into a suspicious clump of spiderweb that looked like an enemy, the tightly stretched web unraveled. At that moment, the ant sprang into the air and soared with an acceleration 130 times that of gravity. Its final destination was a spiderweb hanging above it. In the Australian rainforest, a spider that hunts specific ant species by ‘abducting them in mid-air’ in this manner has been discovered.
Researchers from Greifswald and Australia have observed how a spider outsmarts particularly defensive ants. It is a "the most powerful known fishing system in the animal kingdom."
New-to-science spider builds trap that flings ants into the air
A spider living in the rainforests of Queensland, Australia, builds a snare trap reminiscent of a Roman-era ballista weapon that it uses to catapult green tree ants into a web 30 centimetres above
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