Jumping spiders (Salticidae) are renowned dancers, but until recently, the music of their courtship was thought to fall on deaf ears. No one had heard of spiders being able to perceive sounds until a recent serendipitous finding published in Current Biology by Ronald Hoy and colleagues from Cornell University, USA. Having previously shown that the spiders rely heavily on vision as they strut th...

Spiders have become an important model to study the evolution of sociality, but a lack of their detailed natural history and taxonomy hinders broader comparative studies. Group-living crab spiders (Thomisidae) provide an excellent contrast to other social spiders since they lack a communal capture web, which was thought to be a critical factor in the evolution of sociality. Only three non-webbu...

Cases of mimicry provide many of the nature's most convincing examples of natural selection. Here we report evidence for a case of predator mimicry in which metalmark moths in the genus Brenthia mimic jumping spiders, one of their predators. In controlled trials, Brenthia had higher survival rates than other similarly sized moths in the presence of jumping spiders and jumping spiders responded ...

The tephritid fly Zonosemata vittigera (Coquillett) has a leg-like pattern on its wings and a wing-waving display that together mimic the agonistic territorial displays of jumping spiders (Salticidae). Zonosemata flies initiate this display when stalked by jumping spiders, causing the spiders to display back and retreat. Wing transplant experiments showed that both the wing pattern and wing-wav...

Molecular spiders are nanoscale walkers made with catalytic DNA legs attached to a rigid body. They move over a surface of DNA substrates, cleaving them and leaving behind product DNA strands, which they are able to revisit. The legs cleave and detach from substrates more slowly than they detach from products. This difference in residence time and the presence of multiple legs make a spider mov...

Habitat heterogeneity that occurs within an individual's lifetime may favour the evolution of reversible plasticity. Colour reversibility has many different functions in animals, such as thermoregulation, crypsis through background matching and social interactions. However, the mechanisms underlying reversible colour changes are yet to be thoroughly investigated. This study aims to determine th...

Spiders are one of the biggest and most diverse groups of arthropods. There are around 40000 described species of spiders, belonging to more than 100 families and 3600 genera. However, 170000 species of these arachnids are estimated to exist in the world, which reflects the scantiness of studies about this group. The distribution and diversity of spiders in macro and micro-scale in the tropics ...

Jumping spiders (Salticidae) are renowned dancers, but until recently, the music of their courtship was thought to fall on deaf ears. No one had heard of spiders being able to perceive sounds until a recent serendipitous finding published in Current Biology by Ronald Hoy and colleagues from Cornell University, USA. Having previously shown that the spiders rely heavily on vision as they strut th...

The evolution of fluorescence is largely unexplored, despite the newfound occurrence of this phenomenon in a variety of organisms. We document that spiders fluoresce under ultraviolet illumination, and find that the expression of this trait varies greatly among taxa in this species-rich group. All spiders we examined possess fluorophores in their haemolymph, but bright fluorescence appears to r...

Over the last three decades, the fossil record of spiders has increased from being previously biased towards Tertiary ambers and a few dubious earlier records, to one which reveals a much greater diversity in the Mesozoic, with many of the modern families present in that era, and with clearer evidence of the evolutionary history of the group. We here record the history of palaeoarachnology and ...