Prof. Ajay Narendra from Macquarie University in Australia tells NPR about his team's discovery of a particularly rare, and high-powered, hunting method of the informally named "ballista spider."

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) In the sky. It's a bird.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As character) It's a plane.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As character) It's Superman.

Well, no, it's not wearing a cape and, kablooey, it gets trapped in a spider's web. You see, this isn't a "Superman" movie - more like a horror film with a tarantula.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As character, screams).

SIMON: And it's real life, and how a newly discovered species of spider captures green ants in Australia.

AJAY NARENDRA: My name's professor Ajay Narendra. I'm a professor of insect neuroethology. I'm at the School of Natural Sciences Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

SIMON: Professor Narendra and his colleagues published a paper this week that details the ballistic speed with which a new spider hunts its prey with a hundred percent observed success rate.

NARENDRA: Most spiders typically avoid hunting ants because ants are considered to be very dangerous animals for spiders because ants have several numbers in a single colony.

SIMON: But those still unnamed spiders do not shy away from a challenge. Not only do they hunt some of the most aggressive ants Australia has to offer. They do so with engineering finesse.

NARENDRA: It takes about three to four hours for it to build an entire web high up from the ground. And then, as it builds the web, it starts to use tension lines, so all made of silk. And it starts to build a cone-like structure on a substrate. It could be a leaf in close proximity to these aggressive green tree ants.

SIMON: So the spider builds a cone-shaped receptacle, and using more webbing, it ties down that cone to a leaf very tightly, like a spring-loaded trap. And then it adds an outer layer of silk that mysteriously attracts only green tree ants. And the ants? Well...

NARENDRA: They dislodge this conical snare, and because the spider has made the silk quite sticky, the ant cannot let go. And because the spider has also added so much of tension on these silk lines, it literally propels the ant up from the substrate back to its core web - absolutely unheard of and brilliant.

SIMON: Well, brilliant for us. The ant is catapulted. Using fast cameras, professor Narendra and his colleagues calculated that the ants fly at amazing speeds.

NARENDRA: The acceleration at which the ant gets propelled is about 1,360 meters per second squared. That's equal to about 140 G's.

SIMON: A hundred forty times the force of gravity. That's over five times what trained fighter pilots can handle. Ha - try that, Tom Cruise.

SIMON: Remarkably, the ant survives impact, but it remains trapped until the spider decides to eat it. The spiders are part of the Propostira genus of spiders. They're new to Australia, and professor Narendra says these mavericks have never been seen hunting like this before. For now, the professor says they've given the spider an informal name after a similar ancient weapon.

NARENDRA: The best analogy we could think of was the medieval Roman weapon, which is the ballist. And we said, let's call it the ballista spider.

SIMON: Narendra says the study of ballista spider is still in its early days, but there could be some practical applications based on what they discover from how these spiders trap their prey and how the ants survive a g-force that is double that of surface-to-air missiles. Nature, as they say, is metal.

NO RESOLVE AND STATE OF MINE: (Singing) Oh.

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