A great number of people are scared of spiders. While there are a few, very few, dangerous species, most are completely harmless to humans! Indeed, without spiders we'd be overwhelmed by other insects in short order.
In order to remove some of the stigma and fear associated with these wonderful creatures, I like to use macrophotography and one of my favourite subjects are the jumping spiders!
These spiders do not build webs to capture prey, rather they stalk and then pounce on their meals. To do this they need very good eyes, of which they have 8! The first pair are the largest and the second pair are also rather big. The other two pairs are smaller but still very good at detecting the movements of potential predators and prey alike.
This is a female Carrhotus xanthogramma a member of the Salticidae jumping spiders.
The jumping spiders are typically rather small, the above spider is perched on the wire of a chainlink fence. Adult females of this species, bigger than the males will be about 10mm-12mm when full grown.
Slightly zoomed out to appreciate the scale:
I was fortunate to find a male Carrhotus xanthogramma close to where I found the female a few days later. He's much smaller somewhere between 8mm-10mm.
Most jumping spider males are a good deal flashier and more brightly coloured than the females. This species has white patches at the end of it's palps and they contrast with the black face and head of the spider. The patches are used to signal other spiders, either to males in a kind of competition or to advertise fitness to the female spider, who can and often do dine on males that don't make the grade!
It's been a while since I was active on Steem and now HIVE which was prior to the communities being implemented, so if you have any advice on how to best use this feature I would very much appreciate it!
I do like to interact with my readers as well, so please leave a comment!