Jumping Spiders

[ CW: spiders (naturally) ]

To my knowledge jumping spiders are active all year but I tend to notice them a lot more during the early autumn, so I've spent the last few months searching in various crevices around the garden and my house trying to photograph these cute and immensely clumsy beasts.

Before that, I'd like to give a special thanks to Jason Steel as his photography site was very useful in identifying the various spiders in this blog post. His site has tons of high quality macro photos so be sure to check it out!

Also I'd like to recommend Jumping Spider Film on YouTube, which is a series focused on the owner's pet jumping spiders. (It took me a while to write this post because I kept getting distracted watching their videos.)

This first spider is a House Jumping Spider (Pseudeuophrys lanigera), which as their name suggests are commonly found indoors, usually during the colder months of the year. In fact they seem to be particularly common specifically in the room where I write these blog posts; there's actually one crawling around my ceiling as I'm typing this right now haha.

Overhead view of a brown jumping spider with thick wiry fur on its body. Its palps have even thicker fur and are lighter in colour.

An alternative name for this species is the Fleecy Jumper spider which is a. adorable, and b. very fitting. These absolutely look like they've been knitted together.

[Update from five minutes after writing this segment: One of these spiders has just landed on my computer screen!! What are you doing?!?]

Another photo of the same brown spider. This one shows the spider's face which has four large eyes at the front and four smaller eyes to the sides.

Next is a Zebra Jumping Spider. These are the jumpers I see the most around the garden, primarily due to their distinctive black and white striped patterns. That said, this one has such light markings that I didn't recognise her as a Zebra at first. She has more of a calico pattern going on.

Apparently there a few sub-species of Zebra jumpers in the UK and all of them can vary greatly in colour, so I might have run into one of the rarer variants here.

An overhead view of a lightly coloured stripy spider.

I also managed to get this photo of her looking directly at the camera. Very cute! I've cropped it out, but the round shape you can see to the right of the image is the screw of a door handle — that should give you a good idea of how tiny she is.

A close up of the same spider's face, showing off her four large front eyes.

I found this last spider around some shrubs at the end of the garden. They might be a Sun-Jumper in the genus Heliophanus, which are spiders often found basking in direct sunlight, but it's difficult to tell species in this genus apart so I'm not going to attempt an exact ID here.

Whatever it is, this spider was very small, and based on the lack of colour in their legs they might be fairly young too.

A small black spider with transparent legs and light yellow palps.

When visiting my Nan's house I found this other jumping spider which also appears to be a Sun-Jumper. Perhaps an older one. The white line markings on these species are cool, and I like how their eyes seem slightly too big for their head.

Another black spider of a similar species. It has bright white markings on its abdomen.

That's all of the jumping spiders for now, hope you enjoyed looking at them!

A second photo of the small black spider with transparent legs. It's waving one of its palps in the air as if to say goodbye.

"goodbye! :3"