Having photographed and filmed Maratus volans (stories 1-4), I was keen to see the other four Maratus species known from Eastern Australia: amabilis, splendens, pavonis and vespertilio. I was lucky to find three of them soon after, namely splendens (story 9), pavonis and amabilis, but Maratus vespertilio was still missing from my collection. But how do you document a peacock spider that you don’t know what it looks like or where it lives ! Maratus vespertilio was named by the French naturalist Eugène Simon in 1901 but there were no published photographs or illustrations of it. All that was “known” was a couple of sentences in Latin and a vague location “Eastern Australia: inland Victoria”. And this intriguing name “vespertilio”, meaning “bat-like”. I needed to look for a bat-like spider in Inland Victoria. Right !
There was a fair chance that the animal Simon had in front of him when naming vespertilio was still preserved. I wrote to the curator of the Paris museum, where Simon had worked. The reply was positive but disheartening at the same time. There was a vespertilio specimen in their catalogue but it could not be found. It must have been borrowed by someone, but the details had not been recorded, so there was no indication by whom and when it was borrowed.
At the time I corresponded regularly with Julianne Waldock from the Western Australian Museum. She had been studying Maratus long before I did. I told her the story about the missing vespertilio specimen and it turned out she was the one who had it on loan. This was of course a relief, for me as well as the museum. The mystery of the missing specimen was solved, and not only that, it was in the hands of a person who could assist me. I never got to see Simon’s specimen, it remained with Julianne and has probably been returned to the museum later. However, Julianne had compared it with the spiders she had collected all around Australia and had found the same species at numerous other locations. One of those locations was not too far from where I lived, about 7 ½ hrs drive from my home, in a small place called Whitton, in western New South Wales.
Whitton was a place I had never heard of before, and if it wasn’t for Maratus vespertilio I am sure I would still have no knowledge of it. It is not a place that would feature on a tourist’s itinerary. That’s the beauty of doing this kind of work, it gets you to places that you never intended to visit and you can discover their hidden charm. On 12 November 2010, I threw a few things into the back of the car in case I needed to stay overnight, sleeping bag, stove and mattress, and headed off to Whitton. I didn’t mind the long drive, in fact I loved driving through the inland, and having the occasional stop at some lonely cafés. A very nice break from busy Sydney.
Whitton was founded in 1850 and is named after John Whitton who was Engineer-in-charge of the New South Wales Government Railway. He is regarded as the father of the New South Wales Railways. Internationally he is recognised as one of approximately twenty of the greatest railway civil engineers in the first century of world railway construction.
So it was a railway town and as such it has a nice looking railway station. However, no trains have come here for years, the line was shut down for passengers in 1985. Whitton now has a population of about 490 people, but you won’t see that many of them in the street, most must be farmers living in the surrounding countryside. It is a dry and hot place, but thanks to irrigation from the nearby Murrumbidgee river, a lot of crops grow there. Whitton also has a pub, a general store, a post office, a church, a fire station, primary school, public swimming pool, a bowling club, all the essentials for a small inland town.
Julianne had provided me with some coordinates for the spiders and they were seemingly inside a fenced area in which I saw cattle and horses grazing. There was a small track leading in the right direction, but it was signposted as one to the rubbish disposal site for the town. Rather than following this track, I decided to explore by foot. So I entered the area via a cattle grid and open gate and walked for about a kilometre, with the occasional glance on my GPS to make sure I was still on the right track. I made my way through a paddock past cows, horses and huge flocks of budgerigars, which were quite a sight, I don’t think I have ever seen flocks that big. Eventually I arrived at a small patch of woodland, just a few small trees.
I still had no idea what the animal I was searching for looked like, but Julianne hinted that it was quite cryptic in colouration. The search was pleasant, the small patch of trees was full of unusual birdlife and a pack of horses frequently visited me to inspect what I was doing. The only thing that was bothering me were the flies. If you have travelled in inland Australia, you will know what I mean. You can either put up with it and keep scaring them away with your hand or you wear a flynet. Neither is optimal when you look for small spiders on the ground. A couple of hours into the search I found a greyish jumping spider with a squarish body and long third pair of legs, characters typical of Maratus and a few more specimens turned up later. No doubt I had found what came for. Unfortunately no females were to be found, but I had accomplished stage 1 of my adventure to document vespertilio.
At home I recreated their habitat and successfully tricked the Maratus vespertilio males into showing their display, by offering them females of other Maratus species. Isn’t it lucky that males don’t seem to be very good at distinguishing between different species. The expanded flaps of the male vespertilio looked fairly dull when compared with volans or splendens, and their dance wasn’t as fancy or energetic, just a few flicks with the abdomen and a raised leg. However, I really liked them. I found them exceptionally cute with their large and fluffy front legs and furry faces, and the longer I watched them the more I fell in love. Still today, after having seen over 80 species in this group, Maratus vespertilio remains one of my favourite peacock spiders, and it is certainly the most underrated.
I was determined to do this spider justice and make people like them. And to do so I wanted to produce a little documentary for my YouTube channel. Its drab colours and the dry habitat it lived in were an interesting contrast to the flashy peacock spiders from Sydney. But I had to wait for another year, as for now the season was at an end. The photographs and observations I had collected though were worth publishing, and David Hill and I produced a small article that we published as Peckhamia 92.1. It was the first time this spider was illustrated in the scientific literature, 110 years after it had been named.
In August 2011 I returned to Whitton. This time I did not want to walk all the way to the site and did not want to carry all my film gear through the paddocks so I found a way through a gate and parked the car on the paddock. This turned out to be a mistake. I never discovered why, but my car proved to be a magnet for the horses. I just couldn’t stop them licking all over it and whenever I tried to shoo them away they were right back. Eventually it was completely covered with mud and horse saliva.
The spiders seemed to be at their peak and I was making the most of the day, collecting photographing, filming, the whole lot. I even recorded a little intro for my video, similar to what I had done in my Maratus volans movie showing a bit of the spider’s habitat and me in front of group of friendly cows. Despite some hiccups caused by the windy conditions I was happy with what I achieved and by mid-afternoon was ready to pack up and head home. It was then that I noticed one of my memory cards was missing, fallen out of my camera bag somewhere. I was cursing myself for being so careless. What now ? I wasn’t prepared to leave without it, there were some good photographs on it.
I searched for two hours, systematically metre by metre going over the entire terrain. Eventually I found it, just as the sun disappeared behind the horizon. It had now become too late to commence the 7 ½ hour journey home, too dangerous to drive in the dark with all the kangaroos on the road, so I sat down under a tree, having a little rest before deciding what to do next. And there I noticed something strange happening right in front of me. Two vespertilio males were seemingly engaged in some kind of fight, hopping and pushing each other. The first time I had seen peacock spider males interacting with one another. I quickly got out my video camera and managed to recorded the last few seconds of it, proof that I hadn’t imagined it.
At home when observing the males on my desk, the male-male interactions revealed themselves as being even more remarkable than I had realised. Now in hindsight I felt quite lucky. If I hadn’t lost my memory card that day, this behaviour would probably still be unknown. They weren’t just random little squabbles between males, they were predictable and followed a pattern. From quite far away, 30 cm or so, one male assumed a crouching stance, and started to signal to another male, by repeatedly extending leg III, rising on legs II and IV and simultaneously showing off his elevated abdomen with expanded flaps. The second male responded likewise, with similar signals. Most of the time nothing else happened, but occasionally this seemed to be interpreted by both as the start of some kind of contest.
Like the knights in a medieval jousting competition, they started to hop towards each other, while regularly pausing and repeating their leg pushes and flaps display. Eventually they were so close that they could touch each other. Both males pressed the tips of their front legs against those of the rival male. They then took turns in gently hitting each other with the front legs and this could continue for minutes. Eventually one male retreated, and often was followed by the other over some distance, to make sure he would not return. Surprisingly perhaps, not once did I observe a male being injured in this process, it was entirely peaceful.
The longer I watched the more I became convinced that the males were defending a small territory or a lookout. In the field I had noticed that the males liked to perch on slightly elevated places, and in captivity they did the same. They seemed particular fond of the clumps of dry cow dung that I had brought with me from Whitton to furnish their habitat. These clumps weren’t uniform, some were slightly larger than others and were more popular with the males. Once a male took up residence there, they seemed to want to stay put and to defend it against other males who wanted to occupy the same spot. In some ways this made sense. The mating success depends on locating a female and making eye contact with her, so a slightly more elevated position would be helpful in securing a partner.
Ritual combat or agonistic behaviour as it is called scientifically is known throughout the animal kingdom, and also known for many spiders, including jumping spiders. However, this specific type of hopping contest that I had seen here was unlike anything previously recorded. It was not just unique for peacock spiders, but spiders in general. Once again I had stumbled onto something extraordinary, totally by accident.
Filming Maratus vespertilio was challenging, but also entertaining. I already mentioned in a previous story how important natural light is for filming. But what could I do with animals that I had collected 7 ½ hours drive away and now had in my home in captivity ? I had a small 2 person dome tent, and when I removed the fly there was plenty of diffuse light penetrating into it. I decided to give that a go. I put a small wooden table into the tent and onto it a roughly A2 sized cork pinboard. Here I had had strewn some sand, sticks, bits of cow pats, everything that made this habitat more authentic. The signalling of the males was something that happened frequently and I could easily film with just a couple of individuals, but only rarely did it lead to the full blown “hopping contest” that was so special. To maximise my chances of filming it, I decided to pull out all stops, to place all males and females that I collected onto the corkboard together, 50 in total, all at once.
Now picture this. A small tent in the garden, large enough to crouch, a bedside-sized table in the middle, with 50 jumping spiders on it, and me with camera kneeling at the side. Of course the jumping spiders weren’t staying on the table. Soon I ended up with them all around me. After a couple of minutes filming I usually spent several minutes rounding them all up again and returning them back onto the table, while some more had jumped off it in the meantime. It was like herding cats. I had of course zipped up all the doors and made sure there was no hole large enough for a jumping spider to escape through. The biggest challenge was not to squash any of them. I couldn’t really see what was going on around or behind me and had no idea where they all were once they hopped off the board, I was concentrating on filming and photographing what was happening on my corkboard. I did this for hours, for several days. Eventually the perhaps inevitable happened, even though I was extremely careful with my moves in the tent, one got squashed. I felt deflated, but on the other hand I think it was an achievement not having killed more under these circumstances, I really did my best.
After sharing a small tent for several days, it is probably not surprising that I developed a special affection for these spiders. I was very grateful for their contribution, even though it was involuntary. They deserved to be treated not like scientific objects but like a movie stars. The least I could do for them was to return them back to their habitat. And that’s what I did. After one month at my home, I drove 49 spiders back to Whitton, a 15 hr return trip. Releasing them was the perfect finish to this project, it was a happy moment indeed. Subsequently David Hill and I detailed the hopping contests and the male to female display in Peckhamia 98.1 and I produced a 7 minute video which you can find on YouTube .
