April 18, 2012

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Spiders in Borneo: Jumping spider rainbow

By Wayne Maddison

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

Returning from the Borneo expedition, I can look forward to months of sifting through specimens, taking data from them, and analyzing. We will be focused on what the specimens can tell us scientifically, but as we are doing this, each specimen will be a souvenir. We will see the label and be transported back to that trail, to that day.

Even though I'm back in Canada, I have a few more blog posts in me, remembering the spiders and the trip. The first of these: a rainbow. You can find any color you want among the jumping spiders, and here, color by color, is a Bornean jumping spider rainbow.

I am frequently breathless at the beauty of salticids, even after all these years. Each species I see for the first time is a jewel.

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Previously in this series:

Spiders in Borneo: Introduction

Spiders in Borneo: Undiscovered biodiversity

Spiders in Borneo: The guests of honor: Salticidae

Spiders in Borneo: Team Salticid

Spiders in Borneo: Mulu National Park

Spiders in Borneo: Dreaming about salticid spiders

Spiders in Borneo: Jumping spiders in the forest

Spiders in Borneo: Beating around the bushes

Spiders in Borneo: Spiders in leaf litter

Spiders in Borneo: A Vertical Life

Spiders in Borneo: Leeches and eyeballs

Spiders in Borneo: Breaking News!

Spiders in Borneo: Falling from above

Spiders in Borneo: What I carry

Spiders in Borneo: Entangled and pierced

Spiders in Borneo: Scattered literature

Spiders in Borneo: Mulu wrap-up

Spiders in Borneo: Lambir Hills

Spiders in Borneo: Replaying the Tape of Life

Spiders in Borneo: More Hispo at Lambir

Spiders in Borneo: Geometrical Jumping spiders

Spiders in Borneo: Trees that grow from sky to ground

Spiders in Borneo: The spiders who wouldn’t be

Spiders in Borneo: The Music of Biodiversity

Text and images © W. Maddison, under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (CC-BY)

Wayne Maddison is a biologist who studies the diversity and evolution of jumping spiders. When he was thirteen years old in Canada, a big jumping spider looked up at him with her big dark eyes, and he's been hooked ever since. Jumping spiders hunt like cats, creeping and pouncing, and the males perform amazing dances to females. His fascination with the many species of jumping spiders led to an interest in their evolutionary relationships, and then to methods for analyzing evolutionary history. He received a PhD from Harvard University. He is now a Professor at the University of British Columbia, and the Scientific Director of the Beaty Biodiversity Museum. He has taken it as his mission to travel to poorly known rainforests to document the many still-unknown species before they are gone, and to study them and preserve them in museums for future generations.

More by Wayne Maddison

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