Phidippus Audax
Halloween Spider Week continues! Phidippus Audax, the “daring jumping spider”, is possibly my favorite of all spiders. Their awareness and expressiveness make them lots of fun to interact with. This gal is enjoying the brief warm of afternoon sun on the sliding door to my deck.
Again, gender is determined by examining the pedipalps, the short fuzzy appendages just below her eyes. What you do is this: you examine them very carefully, and if the spider says “Hey. My face is up here” then you know she’s a girl.
The brilliant green below her eyes are her chelicerae–you can only see the top half of them. Down where you can’t see them (because her pedipalps are in the way) are her fangs, which in phidippi are quite fearsome and plainly visible to the unaided eye. The chelicerae are covered with tiny iridescent scales, much like a butterfly wing. When threatened or courting (and as we’ve already seen, with jumping spiders this is often the same thing), they raise and spread their forelegs to make themselves appear larger, and they draw aside their pedipalps to fully expose chelicerae to make themselves look more fierce. I recall reading that the color of the chelicerae is important to the mating display. My memory may be faulty on this, but I seem to recall that males have blue chelicerae while females have green ones; I think this is limited to the phidippus genus.
Oh, and she’s about 10mm long. She’s in her penultimate instar, which is why she’s black and orange. (Fitting for Halloween, no?) She’ll probably overwinter in this stage and go through her final molt in Spring, emerging a pure black with clean white markings.
Spent the evening hunting bugs with Steve Jackson in Austin, TX. We had a rockin good time, and got about a dozen postable pix between us.
ZWarrior said,
October 22, 2007 @ 9:08 am
Wow, nice shot. The numerous eyes thing makes her look that much more otherworldly.
Kit said,
October 23, 2007 @ 10:59 am
Oooh. She is *pretty* :>
In that Henson style of spider way, at least :>
Athena said,
October 23, 2007 @ 2:07 pm
Cool pic. I love jumping spiders!!
SamWibatt said,
October 25, 2007 @ 8:57 am
Terrific shot!
There’s a bike rack just outside of my work and one of these guys lives in or near it. I’ve seen him/her several times recently, which is always fun.
Insect Picture of the Day » Phidippus Audax said,
February 9, 2008 @ 3:40 pm
[...] Sorry for the late post. It turns out that my vast collection of spider pictures actually numbered in the… well, three. I found this picture in a pile of “B photos”, images of bugs that didn’t make it to the site because there was a better picture of that bug. You can see the original picture I ran of this spider here. [...]