![]() ![]() The spiders built their webs just as they would in the wild, and the team recorded how they interacted with prey. student at University of Akron, Ohio, and colleagues captured wild Hyptiotes cavatus spiders and reared them indoors. Speedy spidersįor the new study, study leader Sarah Han, a Ph.D. The authors argue it is the animal kingdom's only known example of external power amplification-using an outside object to store and multiply energy to be released all at once. In fact, Hyptiotes cavatus’s web slinging can reach accelerations in excess of 770 meters a second squared, or about 26 times the maximum acceleration of a NASA space shuttle. Now, a new study using high-speed cameras has revealed these webs store and release a staggering amount of energy. ![]() Sometimes the spider will even “reload” and “fire” the web a few times to ensure its prey is incapacitated, he says. student at the University of Akron in Ohio and coauthor of a new study on the spider. The effect is “kind of like a net gun,” says Daniel Maksuta, a Ph.D. ( See pictures of the world’s biggest, strongest spider webs.) When a bug bumps into the web, the spider let go of its anchor line and releases slack from its abdomen, catapulting its web (and itself) forward and capturing the bug in silk.
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