Bold Jumping Spider, Phidippus audax. My favorite jumping spider. First learned about them/fell in love with them when a curious one found its way into my house and played tag with me while I was writing my thesis last summer: Video 1 [link] Video 2 [link] Video 3[link]
This morning I found a beautiful bold jumper had passed away on the window outside. I brought her in and put her under the microscope. Observe the full rainbow on the chelicera–typically only the blue/green tones come out in life. Also, look for the eyes on the side of the cephalothorax (basically, they’re where our ears are).
I believe I saw this spider alive a week ago (first full-body photo). When I collected her this morning, a smaller jumping spider (a male?) came up to her to look. I try not to anthropomorphize but it’s hard to stare at a face with two big giant eyes that stare back at you and WATCH YOU like jumping spiders do. Anyway, I let him pay his respects before I brought her inside.
For how colorful and flamboyant jumping spiders are, they are typically very very small. Very small. Like, one or two grains of rice small. But bold jumpers get BIG. Check out the bottom photo: biggest bold jumper I’ve ever seen. She was at least 3 cm long. Hard to get a good photo of her–apparently that’s how you live long enough to get huge like that.
do other people remember when “camel spiders” were like a meme because everyone swore they could scream and leap and eat people’s faces off
instead watch this fluffy chicken lobster get scared of a tinier cricket for long enough that the guy gives up filming her for a while
It’s a shame they don’t live very long in captivity. They believe they live up to a year in the wild, but it could be more! We just don’t know yet.
I’ve heard that a lot of them pass away after six months when kept as pets. It could be they are missing a vital nutrient or environmental aspect that we don’t know or can’t duplicate in captivity. I hope they figure out how to fix that soon.
But yes, here is another amazingly pretty animal. If you encounter them in the wild and they run at you, they aren’t trying to attack you! They just want to rest in your shadow where it’s cooler 🙂
A hobbyist in Taiwan stumbled onto it first, keeping their solifugid alive for more than two years by feeding it a whole lot LESS than what’s normally advised and giving it a winter dormancy period. There isn’t even scientific documentation that they hibernate, but when allowed to cool off in the winter months, their solifugid stopped eating completely and buried itself until spring!So for all these years, incomplete information on solifugid habits – even from the most professional sources – had hobbyists overfeeding them and just completely running them down in a few months 😦
Tarantulas in media: great big vicious monsters, insatiable appetites, super deadly, ultra predators, terrifying soulless beasts
Tarantulas in real life: fragile, soft-bellied, eat your dinner or just fucking molt already it’s not that hard, ‘I’m fasting for religious reasons that I’m not going to explain and your offerings of crickets offend me’, ‘oooh nooo I stepped in my water dish and now my foot’s wet I’m going to climb up the glass to sulk about it and if I fall I might DIE and THEN you’ll be sorry’, will yank out ass hair when angry, arches up on tiptoes to avoid belly being touched by passing cricket, might hurt self on own skeleton, leave scraps of web lying around for no reason, constant maladaptive daydreaming, the stoners of the spider world
‘care guides say I like to burrow but nah, I just like making messy piles with substrate and then knocking them over like a child with sandcastles’
also featuring: ‘this plant has been with me for ten years, time to have a sudden mood change and spend an entire night ripping it out and destroying it’ and ‘thanks for putting water in my vivarium i will now continue to shovel earth into it at every opportunity’, ‘i am a vicious predator and- oh no is that a woodlouse crawling over my foot oh no ew better go and sit on top of my cave ew’, ‘hello pesky HUMAN can you please take out these old leaves i found i wrapped them up into a nice bundle for you and put them in the corner i dont like them TAKE THEM OUT’ and, my forever favourite: ‘ohhhh this thermometer looks nice. it’s round. it’s pretty. I WILL WRAP ALL MY LEGS AROUND IT WHILST CLIMBING AND- oh. oh im sliding. it’s coming off. oh. WHY AM I ON MY BACK. OH.’
I’m reading this and I would still kill a tarantula if it got anywhere near me.
cool then don’t come to my house and don’t add on to my posts
“lol let’s talk about how silly our supposedly scary pets are”
“hey I’d kill your pets”
^don’t do that. I don’t care if a gang of tarantulas ate your mother, keep your negativity off of people’s happy posts about their pets.
I got new bugs. I’m gonna be yelling about them for a while. This is Bananas, Nephila clavipes, and she’s the coolest fucking spider I’ve ever seen. I could cry, I’ve loved these guys for so long and now I get to keep one. I never could find one even in the wild to photograph while I was in FL 😂😂😂. It’s a good damned day, my dudes. #spider #nephilaclavipes #bananaspider
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