| Wheel spider | |
|---|---|
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Arthropoda |
| Class: | Arachnida |
| Order: | Araneae |
| Family: | Sparassidae |
| Genus: | Carparachne |
| Species: | C. aureoflava |
| Binomial name | |
| Carparachne aureoflava Lawrence, 1966 |
|
The Wheel spider, Golden Wheel spider, or Dancing White lady spider (Carparachne aureoflava), is a huntsman spider native to the Namib Desert of Southern Africa.[1] The spider escapes parasitic pompilid wasps by flipping onto its side and cartwheeling down sand dunes at speeds of up to 44 turns per second.[2][3]
Wheel spiders are up 20 millimeters in size, with males and females the same size. The wheel spider is nocturnal, and a free-ranging hunter. Its bite is mildly venomous, but the spider is not known to be harmful to humans.[4]
The wheel spider does not produce a web. Its principal line of defense against predation is to bury itself in a silk-lined burrow extending 40–50 cm deep. During the process of digging its burrow, the spider can shift up to 10 liters, or 80,000 times its body weight, of sand. It is during the initial stages of building a burrow that the spider is vulnerable to pompilid wasps, which will sting and paralyze the spider before planting eggs in its body. If the spider is unable to fight a wasp off, and if it is on a sloped dune, it will use its rolling speed of 1 meter per second to escape.[5]