March 15, 2012

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Spiders in Borneo: Team Salticid

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

Salticids, commonly known as jumping spiders, are our focus. We are Team Salticid Borneo (unfortunately, we forgot to prepare T-shirts in advance).

The four of us have come together from different backgrounds to search for salticids. From left to right in the photo, we are: Ch'ien Lee, a wildlife photographer and naturalist based here in Borneo; Edy Piascik, graduate student at the University of British Columbia; myself, with the goofy smile (anticipating cool salticids); and Alex Ang, a musician from Malaysia with an interest in spiders and scorpions.

Edy and I arrived in Kuching, Sarawak, a few days ago. We have experience in looking for salticids, but not Ch'ien and Alex, and so we've been going out on day trips from Kuching as a rehearsal for our foray deeper into Borneo. This also helps us to check out our equipment and recover our field legs. Tomorrow Eddy, Alex and I fly to our main field site, Mulu National Park. Ch'ien will be leaving us, after having helped us set up the expedition and taught us so much about Borneo natural history. My hope is that I've infected him with a love for these spiders.

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He's also been taking amazing photos of the jumping spiders we've been collecting during our rehearsal. Here's a stunning portrait of an Agorius, a strange local salticid whose body looks like that of an ant. It's holding up its first pair of legs, the way an ant holds its antennae. Since Ch'ien won't be coming to Mulu with us, don't expect such beautiful photos as this for the remaining posts. But, you'll still be able to see how amazing these creatures are.

Previously in this series:

Spiders in Borneo: Introduction

Spiders in Borneo: Undiscovered biodiversity

Spiders in Borneo: The guests of honor: Salticidae

Text and images © W. Maddison, under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license (CC-BY). Photo of the Agorius is copyrighted by Ch'ien Lee, used with permission.

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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