Jumping Spider Mating Dance : Zooillogix

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Jumping Spider Mating Dance

Category: courtship • dance • jumping spider • spider
Posted on: August 3, 2007 1:34 PM, by ableiman

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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Comments

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!!

Posted by: DaveX | August 22, 2007 12:04 PM

That was interesting, but it still has too many legs for me to like it.

Posted by: MarkH | August 22, 2007 12:15 PM

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?

Posted by: spondee | August 22, 2007 12:16 PM

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.

Posted by: James Stein | August 22, 2007 1:37 PM

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.

Posted by: rjb | August 22, 2007 8:54 PM