This spider literally flips for its food.

It was all over for this banded sugar ant as soon as it was lassoed by an Australian ant-slayer spider.[by google]

 For one small Australian spider, tumble is that the secret to seizing ants double its size.

Ants — armed with powerful jaws and typically chemical weapons — area unit therefore dangerous to spiders that fewer than one p.c of arachnids plan to hunt the insects (SN: 9/8/21). High-speed footage currently reveals that the Australian ant-slayer spider (Euryopis umbilicata) will tackle this risky prey by leap over and lassoing its victims with silk.

The looking maneuver hasn’t been found in the other spider species, researchers report September nineteen within the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.This athletic behavior is simply fascinating. I’ve in person ne'er seen this sort of looking,” says Paula Cushing, AN organic process life scientist and keeper of invertebrate zoological science at the capital of Colorado deposit of Nature & Science, World Health Organization wasn't concerned within the study.

Alfonso Aceves-Aparicio, a behavioural life scientist at the goop Plank Institute for Chemical Ecology in pitched battle, Germany, stumbled across the tumble spiders whereas walking home one night. A postgraduate at Macquarie University in Sydney at the time, Aceves-Aparicio was intrigued once he noticed  dark dots darting across the pale bark of a eucalyptus.

The dots were small spiders moving among ants. Suddenly, one in all the spiders jumped. “I thought it had been {trying|making AN attempt|attempting} to flee an hymenopter,” Aceves-Aparicio remembers. “But then I saw the hymenopter floating and that i thought, woah, there’s one thing occurring here.”

Aceves-Aparicio borrowed a high-speed camera to visualize what the spiders were doing in bigger detail. By fastness the action down, he and his colleagues may see that the spiders were in truth looking ants in a very fully unknown method..Most ant-hunting spiders use webs or go on on their prey from behind to reduce risk. however despite being smaller than their prey, Aceves-Aparicio’s spiders were facing banded sugar ants (Camponotus consobrinus) head on. every spider positioned itself so it may watch ants as they stirred up the tree. united approached, the spider flipped higher than its prey. Once within the air, the spider fastened a thread of silk onto the hymenopter.This single tethering action — performed within the house of milliseconds — determined whether or not the hunt would succeed. If the tether stuck, the spider then darted round the hymenopter, dextrously peripheral them with additional silk and yanking them off their feet to be dragged off and consumed. 

What stands intent on Aceves-Aparicio and his colleagues was the technique’s effectiveness. Predators like lions and wolves tend to miss around fifty p.c of their meant targets. The success rate of the sixty spider hunts that the researchers recorded was a staggering eighty five p.c.

To Aceves-Aparicio, the invention shows that extraordinary behaviors will hide in plain sight. “The message here is to possess a bit curiosity and to concentrate,” he says. “There area unit things occurring everyplace. we have a tendency to simply have to be compelled to be there to seek out them.