Peacock Spider

 In May 2005 my family and I had moved to Sydney from Townsville in Far North Queensland. It got too hot there for my taste, I got sick of burning my hands on the steering wheel and constantly looking at the sky and hoping it would rain. Often the clouds rolled in and it looked promising but then they left and rained elsewhere. So when my wife was offered a job in Sydney we jumped at the opportunity to move to colder climes. Soon we managed to buy a small house in the leafy northern Sydney suburb of St. Ives, close to a lot of bushland. Being new in that area we were keen to explore our new neighbourhood.

I didn’t have a job then and spent most of my time photographing wildlife, a hobby I developed while living in Townsville. North Queensland had been great in that regard, a lot of animals there, birds, frogs, lizards, mammals, insects, spiders, you name it. We lived right next to a historic cemetery, and I just needed to jump the fence to see a whole range of interesting things such as goannas that lived underneath the graves. At night the thicknees produced an eery sound. Sydney was different, it was the big smoke, lots of cars, the traffic was terrifying at first. I still remember arriving by car and being so stressed out that I told my wife I would not drive again here, at least not for a few days.

Interesting wildlife was not so easy to come by here. The kookaburras were obliging and so were the lorikeets, unbelievably obliging in fact. I couldn’t believe how tame they get in a big city environment compared to North Queensland. But then it became slim pickings, and I wondered how long my wildlife photography would last here. I ended up spending a lot of time in Taronga Zoo, but that wasn’t really the wildlife photography that I had been aspiring to. Looking through my photo albums I am still amazed though how many animals I managed to photograph, even in a crowded city. I eventually turned to photographing flowers. They don’t move, at least not when there is no wind, and are easy to find. They too of course have their challenges. No matter what subject you pick, each requires a different set of techniques and skills. 

On 24 September 2005, a fateful day as it turned out, some friends who also lived in Sydney invited us for a day out, my wife and I happily accepted and we took one of our children with us. We decided to visit a nearby national park. It was a nice sunny day, the wildflowers were out and I was looking forward to getting a few good snaps along the way. Some bees and butterflies, a few colourful flowers, and even a heath monitor lazing around at the edge of the track offered themselves up. As we were making our way back I stopped in my tracks, noticing something hopping on a small rock in front of me, I almost stepped on it, a small jumping spider. Worth noting that I always watch the ground when walking. It is a habit I acquired from my scientific research work as mite researcher. I did my PhD on a group of mites that are extremely fast, probably the fastest land organisms in relation to their size, they are called whirligig mites. They live on the ground and I used to catch them. They were a lot smaller than spiders and more difficult to spot. Therefore looking for small things had become second nature, a routine that I just couldn’t give up. In the years that followed I always found it amusing that people considered peacock spiders tiny, from my perspective they were giants. Anyway, this particular animal was too small to see any detail, like colour or pattern. What intrigued me though was the way it moved, with very long jumps, extremely nimble. Since I had my camera with me and my macro lens on, I took some shots, so I could later try and find out what I had come across.   

At home I uploaded the photographs on to my computer and that’s when for the first time I became aware of some interesting colours and features. I was particularly interested in the bits of yellow along the side of the body. They seemed very unusual and I couldn’t quite make out what they were. At this point I had no idea that these were folded flaps, as I had never heard about flaps on spiders. My photographs were all dorsal shots anyway so anything folded underneath was impossible to see. I remember looking on the internet to see whether I could identify this spider, but what to search for ? The term peacock spider had not yet entered my vocabulary. Whatever I typed in, nothing came up. As I know now there weren’t any pictures of peacock spiders on the internet back in those days.

Eventually I remembered a small book that my wife once gave me, that was given to her by her uncle, a bookseller in the US. It was called Australian spiders in colour, by Ramond Mascord, written in 1970. A bit like a field guide with colour photographs. There wasn’t much other literature on Australian spiders at the time. Flicking through it there it was, on p. 29, it matched exactly my photographs and was easily recognisable. It was called Gliding Spider Saitis volans and the following is what Mascord said about it “This is probably our most beautiful spider, and only the male is known to science. Though a jumping spider, it is better known for its ability to glide. This is achieved per medium of two “flaps”, one on either side of the abdomen, which have a long, hairy fringe on the outer edges. When not in use, these flaps fold under the abdomen, where they almost meet in the centre of the ventral surface of the abdomen. To use these flaps the spider jumps, then extends the flaps and holds them rigid so that they act as wings, and the jump ends in a glide. These midges can cover considerable distances with this jump-glide combination, and though the spider is only 4-5 mm in body length, he can cover a distance of up to 17 cm. Female unknown.”