Jumping spiders have exceptional vision and therefore, their courtship displays have a highly visual component. This nifty video shows a male jumping spider doing its equivalent of the Booty Drop. Make sure to have your volume on.
For more MTV Grind worthy jumping spider action, check out the Tree of Life Web Project.
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tags: spider, tarantula, chicken-eating spider
Have you been getting bitten by a lot of spiders lately? Are you concerned about Brown Recluse Spiders?
Well, I know people don't like to hear this, but those spider bites you woke up with this morning were probably not spider bites. Spiders don't really bite people.
Check out this "sculpure" of a spider discovered by Biologist Phil Torres, created by what may be a new species of Cyclosa found in the Peruvian Amazon.
A loose spider on a space station.
Okay, that spider was officially INCREDIBLE. Is it making those noises itself? How did they capture those sounds? I didn't know they were so loud... very cool!!
That was interesting, but it still has too many legs for me to like it.
Wow. At first I'm thinking, "Oh cool, the mic is picking up some interesting noises here." Towards the end though, it started freaking me out. What the hell was that? I've never heard of spiders making sounds like that. Was it some sort of tension in the exoskeleton? Do the females pick up on the vibrations as part of the courtship dance or is it some sort of byproduct of the visual?
That was astounding.
That end bit, though? I'm not sure how someone managed to videotape that without bringing out a shotgun in self-defense.
This is a video by Damian Elias and Ron Hoy at Cornell University. I've seen this presented at a couple of meetings (this exact video) and it's always a show stopper. Great to see a roomful of scientists gasping and laughing through the video.
They also made a comical follow up video, where they interspersed the spider dancing scenes with scenes of flamenco dancing. They introduced it as a case of, er, convergent evolution. Now THAT was really hilarious.