Dear Readers, merry Christmas/happy Chanukah! This year, it occurred to me that in spite of being called ‘Bug Woman’ my posts about invertebrates are actually quite few and far between. So this year, I’m going to be looking at the little creatures that perform such important roles in the world, with a focus on Christmas/winter. Let’s see what we find out! 

To start with, this is my favourite Christmas video. I think even the mildly arachnophobic might like it (after all, peacock spiders are about as far from those hairy-legged critters who live in the shed as I am from a marmoset).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYFQQB9vqPw

Peacock spiders are from the jumping spider family – remember this little chap? This is a fencepost jumping spider (Marpissa muscosa) who was living under the stairs on some deckchairs. He isn’t as colourful as the peacock spiders (who all live in Australia by the way, and are only the size of a grain of rice) but he is pretty cute all the same.

And if you are after some proper biological background on the peacock spiders, there’s a clip from a BBC documentary below. Beware, it features dancing, sex and violence, so it all depends what you enjoy at the festive season.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qkzwG2lLPc

And, my copy of the British Arachnological Society magazine this month had a very interesting story about Zebra Jumping Spiders – these are the little stripy critters that you often see on walls or doors. An arachnologist found a female and two males, a big one and a small one, and he made them all a microhabitat so he could observe them. The big male displayed to the female, but she was supremely uninterested and hid in the corner. Then, the small male tried to creep up on her, but the big male scared him away, and at this point she became fascinated with the big male, and eventually mated with him. Part of me can almost see her fluttering her eyelashes and saying ‘my hero’, but that would be very anthropomorphic. Nonetheless, it seems that the macho/protective behaviour of the big male spider was something of a turn on. Maybe he proved that he would provide the female with lots of big, fearless offspring? The lives of these creatures are much more nuanced than we might think at first.

Female Zebra Jumping Spider (Salticus scenicus)