If arachnophobes weren't already traumatized by Australia's huntsman spiders dragging dead mice up the side of fridges, here's another reason to scream: they might be the fastest spiders on the planet.

A team of scientists from the UK and Germany clocked the brown huntsman (Heteropoda jugulans) at a blistering 3.59 meters per second (13 km/h or 8 mph), making it quicker than the previous record-holder, the Moroccan flic-flac spider, which manages a comparatively pedestrian 1.7 m/s (and that's only by tumbling downhill).

The researchers collected 162 spider species from around London, Greifswald, North America, southern Europe, and Australia, filming their sprints across gridded paper. The study, submitted to a scientific journal, also incorporated earlier work by Dr. Christofer Clemente, an evolutionary biomechanist at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, who originally published his findings in 2021.

Clemente, who simply grabbed whatever spiders were easiest to find in his backyard with a head torch, explained that spiders move using a combination of muscles and hydraulic pressure to extend their limbs - a locomotion method completely different from other animals.

Unfortunately for speed enthusiasts, that 3.59 m/s peak lasted only a fraction of a second; the huntsman's average sustained speed is closer to 2 m/s. Clemente suspects huntsmans may be near the "sweet spot" for optimal spider speed - "not too big and not too small" - but admits the science isn't settled yet.

Dr. Jonas Wolff of the University of Greifswald, a lead author, noted that larger species aren't necessarily faster, and web-builders aren't automatically slower than hunters. There appears to be a body mass threshold beyond which speed drops due to mechanical constraints.

So is the brown huntsman the undisputed fastest spider? Wolff hedges: "I would not rule out there are faster huntsman species out there which have not been tested yet." In other words, the arachnid Olympics are still accepting entries.