[HN Gopher] Jumping Spiders
___________________________________________________________________
Jumping Spiders
Author : rolph
Score : 127 points
Date : 2025-04-01 17:33 UTC (5 days ago)
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| 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.
| globnomulous wrote:
| That's a terrific point, and I agree completely. This also
| explains my most recent sci-fi misadventure: a novel by
| Christopher Paolini, _Fractal Noise_ , that earned glowing
| praise from Tschaikovsky. It is a dreadful novel -- wooden,
| stilted, repetitive, unimaginative -- but, hey, the concept
| is mildly interesting, so I guess it gets the Tschaikovsky
| seal of approval.
|
| Peter F. Hamilton doesn't get a ton of praise for
| characterization (and I found his latest novel strangely,
| uncharacteristically vulgar and puerile), but I think he
| has a lot of the chops that Tschaikovsky lacks --
| especially when it comes to language. Tschaikovsky's
| writing is at times awfully clunky. Hamilton's prose, by
| contrast, in my view at least, is in its own category among
| living sci-fi writers for its polish and effective use of
| the countless tools the language offers.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| Interesting. I basically feel the opposite - I love
| Hamilton's ideas and _plotting_ but really think he
| writes characters that don 't feel real, they feel too
| much like archetypes. I can think of a few exceptions to
| this, but almost all of his characters feel like
| programmed automatons to me. And boy has he MISSED BIG
| when writing female characters at times.
|
| Unlike the others, I think Tchaikovsky's best writing is
| in Children of Ruin. I know it's not as popular as
| Children of Time, but I admired the way he didn't
| rinse/repeat and instead created a wholly different view
| of humanity's legacy intersecting with alien life. I
| though the "antagonist" in that book was far more alien
| and creative.
| globnomulous wrote:
| Man, I'm impressed by the quality of the responses my
| offhand comments have received in this thread. I keep
| getting corrected and find myself agreeing with the
| corrections.
|
| You're absolutely right that female characters are, uh,
| not his strength, and mostly I think you must be right
| about characterization in his work as a whole. That being
| said, when I ignore the male characters who seem like
| wish fulfillment of some adolescent power fantasy (Nigel
| Sheldon -- immortal genius, intergalactic industrialist,
| undisputed patriarch, and virile keeper of the harem?
| Please.) and the female characters who are, you know,
| young, "nubile," and hyper-sexual, the remaining roster
| is, I think, solid. Even the characters who are
| archetypes worked for me.
|
| (Edit: sorry, I confused _Children of Ruin_ and _Children
| of Memory_.)
|
| And I find myself agreeing with your assessment of
| _Children of Ruin_. In some ways I think it 's not well
| constructed, sort of stumbling through the mystery,
| winding up much longer than it needed to be, but the main
| character (no spoilers) has a psychological richness that
| I can't recall encountering in his other books and is the
| only of his characters to whose fate I've felt
| emotionally attached. The ending, too, is among the best
| and most affecting I've read in quite a while.
|
| And, yes, the antagonist and setting is, I think,
| incredibly well conceived and well drawn.
|
| So maybe I've changed my mind. Despite some structural
| issues that, I think, weaken the novel (and I think
| recall feeling that the 'reveal' came too early or just
| that the clues leading up to it were too obvious), it may
| be my favorite book in the series. Its more modest cosmic
| stakes and narrower field of view, than a lot of the
| other work of his that I've read, enable Tschaikovsky to
| develop it into something quite special.
| atombender wrote:
| You may enjoy Peter Watts, especially Blindsight and its
| sequel, Echopraxia.
|
| Watts is himself a biologist, with a refreshingly unromantic
| perspective on humanity's place in the universe.
|
| (His other great story sequence, The Freeze-Frame Revolution,
| is some of the darkest sci-fi I've read since Harlan
| Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream".)
| alistairSH wrote:
| Good call. That said, it was only on a second reading of
| each, a few years after the first, that those two books
| clicked for me.
| globnomulous wrote:
| This is an excellent recommendation! I read Blindsight
| earlier this year. Easily one of my favorite sci-fi novels.
| It and Canticle for Leibowitz are in a class by themselves
| when it comes to sci-fi that deals with "philosophical"
| issues.
|
| I'll check out The Freeze-Frame sequence next, thanks!
| First I just need to finish Consider Phlebas, which I'm
| finding pretty weak.
|
| Transference is also on the to-do list. Watts says it is
| almost diametrically the opposite, intellectually, of
| Blindsight, but he also praises it.
| atombender wrote:
| The Freeze-Frame stories are officially called the
| Sunflower series. While different, they have the same
| alien creepiness that Watts is so good at, the extreme
| time frame (millions of years) makes it all the more
| chilling.
|
| It's a novel plus one prequel short story ("Hotshot"),
| two sequels ("The Island" and "Giants"), and two short
| fragments. All the shorts can be found on his web site, I
| believe.
|
| I also really enjoyed Echopraxia, the sequel to
| Blindsight. I think some people thought it was too
| different from what they expected; it doesn't pick up
| Siri Keaton's story, but tells a vaguely concurrent one.
| There's a Portia connection there too, by the way.
|
| Consider Phlebas is one of my favourite Banks novels, but
| I know many people dislike it. If this is your first
| Banks book, don't write off Banks completely. Finishing
| Phlebas is a great stepping stone to read Look to
| Windward, which I personally think is Banks' best Culture
| novel.
|
| What's Transference? The Ian Patterson book?
| globnomulous wrote:
| Sorry, my mistake: the title is _Permanence_. Author is
| Karl Schroeder. If I remember correctly (and clearly my
| memory isn 't to be trusted), Watts says in the afterword
| of _Blindsight_ that he violently disagrees with
| Schroeder, or the perspective Schroeder offers, in that
| book, but I believe he recommends it as a rich
| exploration of many of the issue _Blindsight_ explores.
|
| Thanks for the write up. I'm completely sold on Sunflower
| series, and will probably read it next. It sounds very
| promising -- and probably short enough that I can slip it
| in between books 1 and 2 of the Culture series.
|
| Thanks also for the encouragement to stick with Banks,
| too. I'll try. I'm not sure I'll be able to last for six
| full books though. The storytelling in _Consider Phlebas_
| -- which I 'd call action-adventure sci-fi maximalism --
| isn't working all that well for me. There's so much
| technobabble. There are so many lasers. So much ink is
| spilled filling out the world just for the sake of it.
| It's a massive overload and baroque overdose of sci-fi
| tropes. So far the most interesting episode has been, I
| think, the main character's interaction with the shuttle
| on the island.
| atombender wrote:
| Thanks, I'll check out Permanence, never heard of this
| author.
|
| Oh, Banks is definitely maximalism. I always enjoyed him
| as a kind of more serious version of Douglas Adams; his
| books are infused with a kind of wry, mildly nihilistic
| comedy, full of colourful, somewhat random exposition and
| sarcastic asides. His "Outside Context Problem" [1] is
| like something straight out of the Hitchhiker's Guide.
|
| Phlebas is pretty atypical among the Culture series, in
| that's not particularly funny, but actually pretty grim.
| It's not even told from the point of view of the Culture.
| There is lots of classic Banks shenanigans -- the set
| pieces (Clean Air Turbulences, the Game of Damage), the
| drones, the long expositions of backstory, they're all
| there in later novels.
|
| He's rarely all lasers and explosions, though! Keep in
| mind that Phlebas is his "Hollywood world war 2 movie"
| book. It's his version of the "suicide mission behind
| enemy lines" Hollywood plot (think The Dirty Dozen or
| maybe Cross of Iron). But it's also a really grim version
| of it. It ends up on a poignant note, then undermines its
| entire premise by pointing out, in the appendix -- which
| explains what happened to the characters afterwards --
| that none of it actually mattered in the end. This
| poignancy is carried over to Look to Windward, a sequel
| set about 800 years later that examines the long-term
| consequences of the war depicted in Phlebas. So much of
| the Culture books are about the consequences of war and
| the desire to avoid it at all costs.
|
| Just because I'm a roll, I'd like to add that I think
| Banks' non-Culture sci-fi is underrated. A standout is
| Feersum Endjinn, which always struck me as a novel Terry
| Pratchett could have written if he'd been into hard sci-
| fi. It's set on a future earth where most of humankind
| has long ago left for the stars, and the remaining, rag-
| tag population has descended into a medieval class
| inhabiting the gothic megastructures left by the previous
| generations. Much of the book is told by one of Banks'
| most memorable and endearing characters, a young monk-
| like simpleton who writes phonetically a la Riddley
| Walker (hence the book's scrambled title) and who
| inadvertently bumbles his way into a conspiracy between
| the warring classes. Shades of China Mieville and William
| Gibson here, too, with the baroque city landscape and
| cyberpunky "cryptosphere" holding the uploaded images of
| the dead.
|
| I also really enjoyed his early novel (but later-
| published) Against a Dark Background, a road movie of a
| crime heist thriller set in a sort of anti-Culture
| universe, a planet so distant from any galaxy that its
| civilization has given up ever trying to reach the stars.
| Like Phlebas it's very grim, and not for everyone.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excession#Outside_Conte
| xt_Prob...
| gpderetta wrote:
| I think that Blindsight is a much tighter story with
| great horror (existential or otherwise) elements, and the
| consciousness themes were outstanding.
|
| I liked Echopraxia, but the concept of the god-virus is
| not as fleshed out. Still the treatment of Portia spiders
| by itself make the book worthy of a read.
| globnomulous wrote:
| After reading your comment, I visited a synopsis of
| _Echopraxia_ , because, I realized, I could remember
| almost nothing of it -- only a few snapshots of a space
| station and vampiric predation. Turns out it left almost
| no imprint on my brain. _Blindsight_ is, I agree, much
| tighter (and thus, for me apparently, more memorable).
| Looking back on _Echopraxia, I wonder whether it suffers,
| as_ Children of Time*, I think, does, from trying too
| hard to expand its established universe.
|
| The god virus really is a fun idea -- more of Watts' one-
| man war on the tree of life (not only is God not at the
| top some metaphysical/ontological hierarchy; it's at the
| very bottom) -- but, in retrospect, I think you're right
| that it's not as well developed as it could have been or
| maybe needed to be.
| ashoeafoot wrote:
| player of games is a great starting point
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Blindsight is remarkable for its exploration of what
| intelligent life without consciousness might be like.
|
| For me personally I was amazed that one of the lead
| characters is a vampire. I'm completely burned out on
| vampire stories yet Watts made one I very much enjoyed.
| Even if you're also bored with vampires, I recommend you
| try this book.
| arunix wrote:
| I didn't understand the vampire thing. That seemed like
| the least realistic part of the story.
| globnomulous wrote:
| Oh, man, I love the vampires, realistic or not.
|
| They're a hominid and belong to our species but are
| completely alien and terrify humans at a deep, genetic,
| evolutionary level. I love the way Watts describes Siri's
| involuntary reaction to the vampire, as though his fear
| and awareness of being viewed as little more than a
| potential meal are baked into his biology.
|
| Similar to a newborn duckling that instinctively hides
| from shadows of a certain shape even though it has no
| concept of birds of prey, Siri experiences, when he
| interacts with the vampire, some similarly ancient,
| autonomic memory from the time when our ancestors were
| prey animals. We become little more than flighty,
| paranoid herd animals, jumping at the merest snap of a
| twig, like deer, when we find ourselves in the presence
| of an animal that flips the appropriate switch in our
| biology.
|
| It's a wild, compelling subversion of so many sci-fi
| tropes and so much self-congratulatory tree-of-life
| bullshit and so much of our instinctual belief system
| regarding the way we fit into the world. It's also a
| completely novel (as far as I know) approach to
| undermining the notion of humanity's specialness,
| highlighting the fact that we're just animals -- and that
| our betters are, too, just as the invading aliens are, in
| a very different way.
| gpderetta wrote:
| The sunflower cycle (which FFR is part of) is positively
| optimistic compared to the rifters universe. Which is also
| a great read.
| enriquto wrote:
| > The second and third books leave something to be desired
|
| Also got this feeling on the first read... but now I remember
| them very fondly! I like to think that this trilogy happens
| in the same universe as Dune, being a prequel to the events
| of Dune. The homage to the Dune universe by the author is
| obvious (the names of the books, the notion of "other
| memories", etc). But many notions fit together, with some
| effort in your imagination. The second book of the trilogy
| provides a mechanism to explain the other memories in the
| form of nodal biology. The octopi ftl technique is
| reminiscent of the guild navigators. The third book hints
| subtly at a reason why the butlerian jihad could have
| happened.
| geden wrote:
| I thought the second and third books were also great, but
| different flavours, he didn't just repeat.
|
| The second goes for more of a horror angle and has some
| incredible moments. The third is one of the most ambitious
| books SF novels I've read. Blurry and confusing on purpose,
| which is a fine line to tread (reminiscent of the latter Jeff
| Vandermeer Southern Reach books).
|
| Recently went to a book reading and Q&A for his new one
| Shroud, really smart and humble chap. Deeply into his
| research.
|
| Also, notably, he wrote a book a year for 17 (one seven)
| years before being published. And then it took 12? more novel
| before he had a hit with Children Of Time. He didn't seem to
| have a shred of resentment about that which felt remarkable
| and and incredible example of perseverance and enjoyment of
| process over result.
|
| A fourth Children Of book is imminent.
| globnomulous wrote:
| My exchange with another commenter in this thread led me to
| reconsider the _Children of Time_ series, and I 'm now
| inclined to agree with you, putting the second and third
| books, books, particularly the third, ahead of the first.
| (And as I said elsewhere in the thread, I'm really
| impressed, and delighted, by the quality of the responses
| people have offered to my offhand comments).
|
| "Because we're going on an adventure." Funny, it hadn't
| occurred to me to think of the second book as horror, but
| you're right.
|
| I had no idea Tschaikovsky's career arc was so grueling. I
| agree that he seems incredibly smart. I just, for the life
| of me, can't understand why he had anything nice to say
| about _Fractal Noise_. That misfire alone (Just the result
| of his good manners, politics, or kindness to fellow
| writers?), I think, tarnished my view of his work.
|
| I'll add Vandermeer to my to-read list, thanks!
| 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.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Depends what you mean by "great size"? I guess? Maybe they'll
| never reach elephant size, but Arthropleura was pretty dang
| big.
| adrian_b wrote:
| There is an overlap in size between the biggest arthropods
| and the smallest vertebrates, but neither arthropods can be
| as big as the bigger vertebrates, nor vertebrates can be as
| small as the smaller arthropods.
|
| Some arthropods could reach greater sizes than today during
| times when they had less competition from vertebrates and
| when the air was richer in oxygen, but that has become
| impossible later.
|
| Arthropods have been the first terrestrial animals and then
| the first flying animals. In each case there has been a
| long time when they had no competition from vertebrates, so
| they could be significantly bigger than later, when they
| had to regress to their smaller optimum size.
|
| A very big arthropod would become much slower than a
| vertebrate of the same size, due to difficulties in
| respiration and circulation that would not be able to
| supply the muscles with enough oxygen and fuel for
| sustained effort and due to the need for requiring very
| thick nerves for an acceptable speed of propagation for the
| nervous signals.
|
| Molting creates problems because reaching a great size
| requires a very large number of moltings. Each molting is a
| time when the animal is extremely vulnerable, being unable
| to move or defend itself. Many moltings create many
| opportunities for being killed by some predator, and for a
| bigger animal it would be more difficult to find a hiding
| place during molting.
|
| Arthropleura was very long and thin, which alleviated the
| respiration problems, but even so it must have been a slow
| animal. Fortunately for it, at that time there were few
| terrestrial predators and they were still small. When that
| has changed, nothing approaching the size of Arthropleura
| has ever evolved again.
| card_zero wrote:
| Some discussion of this here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meganisoptera
|
| * There was at least one giant dragonfly-thing alive at a
| time when oxygen levels _weren 't_ all that elevated.
|
| * Maybe they could kind of sort of breathe! By expanding
| their tracheal tubes.
|
| * Subsequently they began to be predated by birds and
| mammals. Prior to that they may have been locked into a
| race (against their prey) to be the biggest, like that
| giant Italian goose and its giant barn owl predators:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garganornis
| adrian_b wrote:
| As mentioned on that Wikipedia page, that big dragonfly-
| like insect from the upper Permian was already only
| slightly more than half the size of its ancestors from
| the lower Permian, which could have been caused by the
| lower oxygen content in the air.
|
| The fact that it was still much larger than current
| insects is most likely explained by the fact that there
| were no flying vertebrates that could compete with it or
| hunt it.
| mmooss wrote:
| Well said; I can delete my (later) sibling comment!
|
| > Molting is one of the features that makes difficult for
| arthropods to reach great sizes
|
| Also, chitin becomes too heavy. Somehow, it's connected to
| body mass increasing as the cube of length, but I don't
| remember exactly how. Maybe the chitin legs would have to be
| too strong.
|
| > their skeleton and tegument cannot grow between moltings
|
| To clarify an essential aspect: because their rigid
| exoskeleton can't grow, they must shed and replace it for
| their body to grow.
| vharuck wrote:
| If you want to see someone that makes you say "Wow" and/or
| "Eww", look up videos of tarantula molting.
| mystified5016 wrote:
| If you've ever found a big 'dead' spider in an open area of
| your basement, chances are high that it's actually a discarded
| exoskeleton and the real, even bigger, spider is still hanging
| around somewhere hidden.
| 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).
| cryptonector wrote:
| > 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).
|
| Same here! Hives that have an inner cover sometimes have
| several of these, and they get to be really big. I imagine they
| snack on a bee a day or so.
| 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.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Many people do keep jumping spiders as pets.
| zabzonk wrote:
| I used to have a zebra jumping spider living on my office
| windowsill - kept me amused for hours.
| 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
| cryptonector wrote:
| That's a great tool!
| 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
| codedokode wrote:
| Spiders are scary enough even without jumping.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Jumping spiders are adorable and no threat to humans.
| codedokode wrote:
| But have a venom.
| HankB99 wrote:
| https://photos.app.goo.gl/wEJJAqsyXVjhT5jW7
|
| Maybe jumping spider? The iridescent colors were spectacular.
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| These things are neat. I like how they see us, disappear, and
| then reappear right above or under us. They'll also jump and spin
| around facing you if you try to pet them from behind. They're
| funny. I have two, recent examples of their disappearing act.
|
| One was on the far end of a picnic table looking at me. It slowly
| moved backwards to disappear under the table. I felt I just knew
| what it was planning. I keep my eyes open as I worked on my
| laptop. Eventually, the spider's head creeps out from under the
| table between my waist and laptop. So, I tried to pet it and it
| starts jumping across the table. I can't remember if it jumped
| off the table.
|
| My mom saw one in or around her car. It disappeared. She had a
| feeling she'd see it again but hopefully not while in heavy
| traffic. Later on, after getting in, a black form slowly descends
| in front of her face. It was just looking at her. I can't
| remember how she reacted to that.
|
| We've had multiple places with lots of brown recluses. Some said
| they were too big. Must be wolf spiders. They look like recluses
| do in all the online pictures and nothing like wolf spiders
| usually do. I've imagined buying a bunch of jumping spiders to
| throw in the attic or underneath a house like that. I wonder if
| they'd (a) kill brown recluses at all and (b) clear a house out.
| While I doubt it's practical, using my favorite spiders as a
| weapon against my least favorite was an amusing thought.
| cryptonector wrote:
| Jumping spiders are really cute and really smart. Every one of my
| beehives has at least one jumping spider somewhere in or near it
| (typically between the lid and the inner cover, in the case of my
| Langstroth hives and my Langstroth to top-bar hive conversions,
| whereas in my from-scratch top-bar hives they typically hang out
| on top of the top bars). We stare at each other. Sometimes I'll
| flick one off its spot on an inner cover, possibly sending it
| very far, but no matter, they always find their way back.
| yungporko wrote:
| jumping spiders are very cool but god this site sucks to use on
| mobile. 3 times i accidentally "swiped" to a new article while
| trying to scroll down before i gave up trying to finish it, at
| which point i realised you can't swipe to go back/forwards
| because they've hijacked that action for the stupid article
| swiping thing. 0/10 worse than plain text on a white background.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Great photos in this article. I wonder what the lens is?
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