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https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jul/09/fastest-spider-on-the-planet-brown-huntsman>
"If arachnophobes were not frightened enough by the horrific ability of
Australia’s huntsman spiders to drag dead mice up the sides of fridges, they
now have another reason.
They might be the fastest spiders on the planet.
One member of the huntsman family, the brown huntsman
Heteropoda jugulans,
was clocked as the quickest of more than 250 spider species analysed by a team
of scientists in the UK and Germany.
Reaching a peak speed of 3.59 metres per second (13km/h or 8mph), the humble
and hairy-legged huntsman appears to be faster than the current world
record-holder, the Moroccan flic-flac spider and its comparatively pedestrian
1.7 m/s (they don’t so much run, as tumble down hill to reach that speed).
The scientists collected 162 different spider species – mostly from around
London and the German city of Greifswald, but also from North America, southern
Europe and Australia – and then measured their running speeds using cameras and
gridded paper as the running track. The research has been submitted to a
scientific journal."
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