Fastest omnidirectional strike

Spiders from the genus Selenops, commonly known as wall spiders or flatties, are capable of turning and striking any prey that approach within a five-body-length radius of their location in as little as 40 milliseconds (that's around the same length of time as it takes for a single frame of movie film to pass through a projector). Importantly, this rapid-strike ability is omnidirectional – meaning that even if the prey is approaching from directly behind the spider, it will still be able to sense the prey's approach, turn 180 degrees and lunge forward in no more than 116 milliseconds (about a third of the time it takes to blink). The rotational speed of the spiders was measured at up to 3,000 degrees per second.

The extraordinary attack speed of selenops spiders was revealed in a paper published in February 2018 by Yu Zeng and Sarah Crews of the University of California, USA. The study involved using a super-high-speed camera to record the spiders' predatory behaviour. It is thought that further investigation of the unique ways the spiders coordinate their movements to enable these rapid movements will provide useful models for the movement of multi-legged robots. Although some ambush predators can strike faster, their target has to be directly in front of them before they'll make their move.