[HN Gopher] Jumping Spiders
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Jumping Spiders
Author : rolph
Score : 87 points
Date : 2025-04-01 17:33 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (digital.tnconservationist.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (digital.tnconservationist.org)
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Most spiders have relatively poor eyesight. Jumping spiders are
| an exception. They will chase a laser spot like a cat.
| 0x1062 wrote:
| I once had a jumping spider on top of my computer monitor and
| it would chase the cursor around as I moved the mouse. I have a
| video that I should post online somewhere
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I just read Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's a nice
| bit of science fiction about the evolution of hyper intelligent
| jumping spiders on a terraformed planet.
| onthewall wrote:
| Excellent book. This reminds me that I need to get on with
| reading the sequels, so thank you.
| globnomulous wrote:
| Great recommendation. The second and third books leave
| something to be desired, in my opinion, but no other sci fi
| authors I'm aware of are as good as he is at what he does. His
| sci fi speculates about biology and ecology, and extrapolates
| outward from them, the way most sci fi speculates about
| technology and society.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Yeah, same thing with his Final Architecture series,
| promising but in the end middling. Great alien/synthetic mind
| concepts, but as the story goes on most of them behave just
| like humans except with funny ways of talking. Tchaikovsky's
| _concepts_ are amazing, but he needs to pair up with another
| author who 's better at aliens as characters.
| Matumio wrote:
| The book makes a reference to _Portia_ , which seem to be quite
| intelligent jumping spiders in reality, in the sense that they
| can plan long convoluted paths and may be able to count.
|
| Research article:
| https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
| thenthenthen wrote:
| TIL spiders 'molt' wow.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Molting their chitinous exoskeleton is a shared characteristic
| of a huge group of animals, which is named using a Greek word
| for this feature (Ecdysozoa) and which includes not only
| spiders and all other arachnids, but also all insects and
| crustaceans and all other arthropods, and also other animals
| related to arthropods, i.e. velvet worms, tardigrades,
| roundworms and several kinds of marine worms.
|
| Molting is one of the features that makes difficult for
| arthropods to reach great sizes (because their skeleton and
| tegument cannot grow between moltings; it only is exchanged
| with a bigger external skeleton during molting), but otherwise
| it has been an important factor for the success of this group
| of animals, by allowing them to live in any environment,
| because their bodies are better separated and protected from
| the environment than for most other animals.
| vharuck wrote:
| If you want to see someone that makes you say "Wow" and/or
| "Eww", look up videos of tarantula molting.
| Galatians4_16 wrote:
| I wish they were larger. I'd keep one and feed it rats & geckos.
| weard_beard wrote:
| https://pressbooks.pub/anansi/chapter/chapter-1/
| vharuck wrote:
| Jumping spiders make great pets. The ones I've kept build silk
| tubes in the upper corners of their terrariums to hide and sleep
| in, meaning I could see them most of the time. They actively
| hunt, which is fun to watch. And even the common phidippus audax
| has bright coloring. They only live a year or two, but it's cool
| to watch them grow.
|
| Beyond the facts in this article, jumping spiders have also shown
| spatial reasoning. When they see prey on another leaf behind
| their jumping range, they'll climb down and find a path to the
| prey's leaf, even if the prey isn't visible during this detour.
| They remember it's relative location and seemingly "choose" the
| best route to get there.
|
| Edit: You can also "hand feed" your jumping spider with a cotton
| swab dipped in sugar water. They drink flower nectar in the wild,
| so my wife and I tried this and it worked!
| vharuck wrote:
| The Peckham Society is an informal group that shares research
| on jumping spiders: http://peckhamia.com/
| greeneggs wrote:
| > Edit: You can also "hand feed" your jumping spider with a
| cotton swab dipped in sugar water. They drink flower nectar in
| the wild, so my wife and I tried this and it worked!
|
| But don't they need live protein, like flightless fruit flies?
| I feel like the need to raise prey is the biggest downside to
| having a jumping spider pet.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Being the the previous poster was talking about their hunting
| practices it sounds like that is how they get water that has
| a bit of nutrient value.
| vharuck wrote:
| They do need protein. Nectar is an extra and easy source of
| energy. And my wife is the kind of person who wants to play
| with her pets, no matter the species. The Q-tip was the only
| thing I agreed to, because I didn't want to terrify the
| spider by picking it up. For sustenance, we gave them meal
| worms, crickets (their size or smaller), and sliced fruit.
| Not sure if they drank much fruit juice, but it kept the
| crickets happy.
| bashmelek wrote:
| I used to see these in Florida a lot when I was a kid. What
| happened?
| Xiol32 wrote:
| We did.
| sejje wrote:
| You grew up
| headsupernova wrote:
| Three times, while photographing these little critters, I've had
| them jump straight onto the camera lens. A startling experience!
| giantg2 wrote:
| I remember being a kid and we had a small jumping spider living
| in our car for about a week. It would actually jump onto our
| hands and let us look at it. Then we'd move our hand to another
| part of the car in the direction it was moving and it would jump
| onto whatever was close there.
|
| Now I find very large mostly black jumping spiders under my
| beehive top lid. No doubt they are well fed on some of the bees
| (I've seen one eating/drinking one).
| every wrote:
| My introduction to jumping spiders was as a child on a long,
| boring drive in the back seat of a Buick. One emerged from
| somewhere down in the door and crawled onto the glass. When I
| moved closer it would back away. When I moved back it would
| follow me. When I tilted my head to get a better look it tilted
| in response. We kept this nonsense up for the rest of the trip...
| fipar wrote:
| We had one as a friend-pet for a while a few years ago. We went
| outside one day and found one leaf in our plum tree was tube-
| shaped with some spiderweb and after some waiting, off she came
| (I have no idea if it was male or female but Spanish is a
| gendered language and spiders are female, so we always referred
| to it as "her").
|
| Every day around noon she'd come out of her leave and wait to
| catch an insect. It was amazing to see her precisely jump to get
| it, and watching her eat was a mix of gross and interesting. I
| normally dislike spiders (though I don't kill them unless I
| really feel threatened) but jumping spiders are an exception and
| I'd actually describe them as nice, almost pet/friend material.
| jtbayly wrote:
| This page kept changing to a new article as I tried to read it.
| Very frustrating.
| yencabulator wrote:
| It's annoying. They use side-scrolling for prev/next
| navigation, and I've discovered I drag down on my touchpad at
| an angle.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Yes. Interesting article. Crap website design.
| symbolicAGI wrote:
| Fascinated by spiders and insects growing up in Upstate NY - the
| largest jumping spider there gets 20mm long. Their eyesight and
| reflexes are fast enough to stalk a landed house fly and catch it
| on its takeoff.
|
| Still feel comfortable today in a deep squat from those days long
| ago.
| zulu-inuoe wrote:
| A nice enjoyable read, thank you
| dev_l1x_be wrote:
| I have these jumping spiders living in my apartment and my kids
| love them. They are natural part of life, harmless and quite fun.
| I was not even aware of these little animals but once I found one
| and started to go down the jumping spider rabbit hole, and after
| tha, bumm, jumping spiders everywhere. I have taken pictures of 4
| species so far in my country, which a super difficult task.
| Anyways, jumping spiders <3.
|
| These two has wikipedia links:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zebra_spider
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asianellus_festivus
| hxorr wrote:
| You can see most species of jumping spider found in your area by
| using iNaturalist's map search tool - example for around Miami,
| Florida:
| https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?lat=25.721542439731...
| Shows 45 species
| somishere wrote:
| It's their movement that I find fascinating. It's like they just
| snap between positions [1]. They're incredibly fast.
|
| Not to mention exceptionally beautiful (often irridescent [2])
| and entirely curious.
|
| I have thousands of happy snaps like those from around our old
| gaf of different pals that caught my eye or walked a web over one
| of us. So cool.
|
| [1] https://i.imgur.com/kVK8z2p.mp4 [2]
| https://i.imgur.com/Ig3Nob5.jpeg
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