Today, I was doing work on my Statistics project. I'm doing an observational study on the sizes of large jumping spiders in my area. I could go into a detailed report of how I'm going about doing this, but I shall omit it in favor of brevity.
The two species I primarily looked at were P. audax and Plexippus paykulli. Of course, I expected the P. audax to be bigger than the other species, but things began looking like a tie, until I investigated one audax nest...
Basically, when I looked at the inside, the first thought I had was, "Oh, it's mating," because there was NO WAY one spider could be that big, Besides, it was too dark to fully see the inside. I decide to make an attempt to 'separate them' so I can record their body lengths when I realized that it was one entire spider.
So I measured the big girl at 17mm in body length. Disregarding legspan entirely.
Legspan included, she's about slightly over 1 inch.
Sadly, I am limited to taking pictures via webcam. Right now the lighting isn't good enough for even that.
Has anyone else had an experience with such a large jumper? I have a feeling she's bigger than most Hyllus diardi females.
The two species I primarily looked at were P. audax and Plexippus paykulli. Of course, I expected the P. audax to be bigger than the other species, but things began looking like a tie, until I investigated one audax nest...
Basically, when I looked at the inside, the first thought I had was, "Oh, it's mating," because there was NO WAY one spider could be that big, Besides, it was too dark to fully see the inside. I decide to make an attempt to 'separate them' so I can record their body lengths when I realized that it was one entire spider.
So I measured the big girl at 17mm in body length. Disregarding legspan entirely.
Legspan included, she's about slightly over 1 inch.
Sadly, I am limited to taking pictures via webcam. Right now the lighting isn't good enough for even that.
Has anyone else had an experience with such a large jumper? I have a feeling she's bigger than most Hyllus diardi females.