Fastest spider

The fastest-running spider is the desert-dwelling Moroccan flic-flac spider Cebrennus rechenbergi, which can reach speeds of up to 1.7 m/s (6.12 km/h or 3.8 mph) when trying to escape predators. It reaches these astonishing speeds (equal to around 100 body-lengths a second) using a unique rolling movement named "flic-flac" (or "Rollspinne" in German) after a circus tumbling technique. When startled, the flic-flac spider will launch itself into a series of forward flips, gaining speed with each rolling leap. This technique gives it a huge speed boost, but uses a lot of energy – spiders can only do for short bursts before tiring.

The flic-flac spider was discovered by Dr Ingo Rechenberg of the Technische Universität Berlin in Jul 2009. Rechenberg – a bionics engineer – was studying the movement techniques of desert spiders not far from the Moroccan village of Tisserdmine, which is located near the Algerian border about 300 km (186 miles) east of Ouarzazate. He tested their speeds by laying out tape measures and high-speed cameras, then jumping at them with a stopwatch to scare them into running away. The figure of 1.7 m/s is an average of all the flic-flac escapes he measured. The fastest individual run reached 2 m/s (7.2 km/h or 4.4 mph), but this may have been helped by a slight slope or tailwind.

Rechenberg sent specimens of the flic-flac spider to Peter Jäger, head of arachnology at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, Frankfurt. Jäger confirmed that it was a previously unidentified species in the genus cebrennus, naming it Cebrennus Rechenbergi in honour of its discoverer in a 2014 paper.