Jumpy

In between a haircut (shorn - yay!) and another epic gardening session, I went for a little bug walk around the garden and found three of these tiny zebra jumping spiders. The irony is that I've been looking for them quite hard since the weather improved last weekend, without finding any - but today, when I was looking for honeysuckle saw flies, I seemed to trip over jumping spiders every time I turned round. Of the honeysuckle saw flies however, there was no sign, which was disappointing; I tend to think that if I don't find any during the first fortnight of April I've missed them for the year, and last year that proved to be the case - but this spring's emergences are a little topsy-turvy, so there may yet be time for me to snap the creature I think of as the bling fly.

However. Jumping spiders are excellent compensation for an absence of bling - and in fact are pretty shiny themselves, especially when they lift their pedipalps to reveal their gleaming chelicerae. One of the challenges in photographing them is to get catch lights in all four of the "front headlight" eyes, while avoiding ugly burned out patches anywhere else - which sadly I didn't entirely manage here. A narrower aperture would have helped, and I'll try to remember that if I get another chance to photograph them - but the other big challenge with jumping spiders is that they're fast and erratic movers, and though they're not especially frightened of humans, they tend to react with disapproval to a large camera being stuck in their faces, and... jump.

I've tagged this as Salticus scenicus because it's the commonest of the UK's three Salticus species, but as it's only possible to separate the three definitively by examining their genitalia under a microscope, I can't be certain of the identification. I am pretty sure it's a female, because males of all three species have enlarged chelicerae, which they use for fighting duels with their rivals to earn the right to mate. My spider bible gives the size of a female Salticus scenicus as 5-7mm, which seems about right, and lists their season as March to October, peaking in May and June. Males are fractionally smaller, and have a shorter season, though peaking at the same time as the females. Salticus species don't spin webs, but catch their prey by jumping on it and immobilising it with a venomous bite; the four eyes on the sides of the cephalothorax (which you can't see in this image) detect movement, and the spider then turns to look with its front eyes, which are able to accurately judge the length of jump required to reach the victim.