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Spiders in Borneo: The guests of honor: Salticidae

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


It's time that I introduce you to the guests of honor of my posts, the jumping spiders, known to biologists by the name "Salticidae". Imagine a miniature cat, 5 millimeters long, spotting prey with keen eyesight, walking carefully toward the prey, then crouching down, inching forward stealthily, tensing its legs, then pouncing with deadly accuracy. That pretty much describes a jumping spider. They hunt like cats, using their acute vision and jumping ability.

Like most spiders, jumping spiders have 8 eyes. Six of these look all around, like our peripheral vision. The two other eyes, in the front middle, are like our fovea, our central vision: narrow field of view, but high resolution. These are the great big eyes in the middle of their faces. You can see photos of these special eyes and how they move in my account of a transparent jumping spider from a recent expedition to Ecuador. What's remarkable is that they can achieve such an acute visual system in such a small package.

As for their jumping, you might wonder: to jump, why don't they have big muscular back legs like a kangaroo or a grasshopper? The answer is surprising. Jumping spiders don't use muscles in their legs to jump. Muscles elsewhere in their bodies contract to raise the blood pressure suddenly, which causes the legs to inflate abruptly and snap straight. A hydraulic jumping mechanism.


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Jumping spiders live all around the world except the extreme polar regions. They live in forests, deserts, prairies, and in cities. There's a good chance there is one within 100 meters of you right now.

Previously in this series:

Spiders in Borneo: Introduction

Spiders in Borneo: Undiscovered biodiversity

Text and images © W. Maddison, under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (CC-BY)

Wayne Maddison is a biologist who studies the diversity and evolution of jumping spiders. When he was thirteen years old in Canada, a big jumping spider looked up at him with her big dark eyes, and he's been hooked ever since. Jumping spiders hunt like cats, creeping and pouncing, and the males perform amazing dances to females. His fascination with the many species of jumping spiders led to an interest in their evolutionary relationships, and then to methods for analyzing evolutionary history. He received a PhD from Harvard University. He is now a Professor at the University of British Columbia, and the Scientific Director of the Beaty Biodiversity Museum. He has taken it as his mission to travel to poorly known rainforests to document the many still-unknown species before they are gone, and to study them and preserve them in museums for future generations.

More by Wayne Maddison