The honour of the first peacock spider having been named is shared by two species: Maratus volans and Maratus speciosus. Both of them were named in 1874 by the British Arachnologist and Reverend Oktavius Pickard-Cambridge. Originally these two species were called Salticus volans and Salticus (Attus) speciosus as nobody yet had proposed a genus called Maratus. The genus Maratus came into being four years later in 1878, but the name was then used for only a single species, and it was neither volans nor speciosus. It was created by the arachnologist Ferdinand Karsch to accomodate the species Maratus amabilis, a peacock spider one of his collaborators found near Sydney. By definition Maratus amabilis became what is called the “type species” for the genus Maratus. Both volans and speciosus were not assigned to Maratus until much later, volans in 1991 and speciosus in 2012. Until then both were classified as members of the genus Saitis to which they had been assigned in 1901.
Why did Rickard-Cambridge name one of the two spiders “volans” which is latin for “flying” ? Being an authority on spiders people from all over the world sent him specimens that he then classified and named. One of the people from Australia who supplied specimens to him was Sydney based arachnologist H.H.B Bradley. He caught several specimens and when he sent them off to England he included a note stating that this spider has a pair of flaps and that the observed the spider elevating and depressing these flaps, using them as wings or supporters to sustain the length of their leaps, similar to a flying squirrel. Rickard-Cambridge believed the story and called it the “flying spider”.
We know now that the male flaps are used not for flying but for courtship display but the myth of this spider being able to fly was not debunked until recently. In 1970 Ramon Mascord published a book on Australian spiders which included a photograph of this spider and the accompanying text “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 “flap” 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 midgets can cover considerable distances with this jump-glide combination, though the spider is only 4- mm in body length , he can cover a distance of up to 17 cm.” So in 1970 it was still firmly believed that this spider could glide even though nobody had in fact seen it.
In 2007 Julianne Waldock published a poster at a scientific conference entitled “What’s in a name ? Or: why Maratus volans (Salticidae) cannot fly.” In it she hypothesised that Maratus volans used its flaps for courtship similar to what had been observed previously in a related spider Maratus pavonis. However, at the time nobody it seemed had actually observed the courtship display of Maratus volans. The first observations and photographs of this behaviour and first photographs can be attributed to Jurgen Otto who came across Maratus volans in bushland near Sydney in 2005. In 2008 he observed the courtship display of this species for the first time and started to publish photographs which a year later, 2009, were used as a basis for the first scientific account in a paper by by David Hill. In 2011 the first video footage of this behaviour emerged, in the form of Jurgen Otto’s YouTube video “Peacock Spider 1”
The second species I mentioned before as being one of the two earliest is Maratus speciosus. The similarities between this species and the other peacock was not clearly recognised until 2012. And this is in part due to the fact that its courtship display had not been observed. Saitis speciosus which it was called until then seemingly lacked flaps that members of the genus Maratus had, so wasn’t regarded as sufficiently similar. However, when Otto & Hill described and illustrate that courtship behaviour for the first time those similarities became abundantly clear and as a result they transferred this spider to the genus Maratus.