This high-velocity maneuver is a nightmare if you’re someone with Arachnophobia or the fear of spiders.

    There’s a type of spider that can slowly stretch its web and then release it, causing the web to catapult forward and ensnare unsuspecting prey in its strands.

   Triangle-weaver spiders use their webs the way humans use a slingshot or a crossbow. Scientists from the University of Akron say this is a process called “power amplification,”.

  The web is stretchy, which allows the spider to amplify its own power by using what the scientists call “elastic recoil.” Scientists say the slingshot-like move shows spiders can use a tool, their own web, in a way that only humans were known to do.

   Here’s how the move works: A triangle-weaver spider makes a triangle-shape web, with a single thread bridging the main body of the triangle and a wall. Then, while gripping that single thread, it walks backward and it tightens the web so it’s storing this elastic energy within the whole triangle shape of the web.

   The spider coils the single strand between its legs tighter and tighter, as if it is pulling back a rubber band. Spiders hold that coiled strand for hours, waiting for prey to fall into the web.

   When it senses prey hitting the web it releases its legs from the back lin. And this causes the spider and the web to spring forward with that release of energy, as if you had released that rubber band. This entangles the prey.

   The spider may repeat this multiple times, tightening and then releasing the web so the prey gets more and more tangled and trapped.