A newly-discovered spider that roams the Moroccan Sahara can perform acrobatic cartwheels.
The spider runs for a short stretch and then stretches out its front legs, landing on its back legs, the New York Times reported.
When the spider does this it achieves a speed of 6.6 feet per second, double its normal pace of 3.3. The move uses an enormous amount of energy, so it is only used as a "last resort" to escape predators.
"I can't see any other reason," Peter Jäger, a taxonomist at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, told the New York Times. "It is a costly move. If it performs this five to 10 times within one day, then it dies."
Cartwheeling has been observed in a number of other species including the "larvae of the southeastern beach tiger beetle (Cicindela dorsalis), the American mantis shrimp (Nannosquilla decemspinosa) and caterpillars of the moth species Pleurotya ruralisand Cacoecimorpha pronubana," the Huffington Post reported.
The species, dubbed the golden wheel spider, spends its life trying to avoid its predator the Pompilid wasp. The wasp sniffs out the spider in its underground burrow and injecting it with venom. The wasp will then insert an egg into the paralyzed spider's abdomen and seal it in a burrow. The spider will remain paralyzed but will not die; it will eventually be eaten alive from the inside out when the larva hatches.
The spider was first discovered by five years ago by Ingo Rechenberg, a bionics expert at the Technical University of Berlin, the New York Times reported.
"I picked it up by hand - I wasn't scared," Doctor Rechenberg told the Times.
The morning after the researcher discovered the spider he witnessed its incredible acrobatics and started to cry.
"It was sensational," he told the Times.
