Those who know me know that I have a love hate relationship with spiders, I love some of them (e.g., Jumping Spiders) yet hate others (e.g., Wolf / Trap Door Spiders). Nonetheless, I have a view that I can't allow one to hang around and not another (I am spider non-discriminatory) so I tend to let most of them hang around in the backyard. The jumping spider is one of my favorite types of spiders, there is something about this family of spider (Salticidae) that in my mind has personality. It contains something like 6,000 described species (something like 13% of all known species) and has some of the best vision among arthropods.

There are many interesting facts I have learnt about jumping spiders, but one of my favorite is that because jumping spiders don't have bones the same way we do, they also don't have muscles as we know them and movement of their legs and so on occurs through hydraulic pressure; the spiders body is filled with a fluid that is sort of like blood called hemolymph which is used to help them move. Another interesting fact is jumping spiders are thought to be able to jump something like 30 – 40 times their own length.

I found this jumping spider in the back yard, it was walking up a timber sleeper and I suspect it caught a glimpse of itself in the reflection of the lens which is probably why it was so fascinated in the lens. The Shot Details were: Sony A7R IV, Sigma 150mm Macro (Nikon with E to F Adapter), 1/250 Secs, f/ 8.0, ISO 2000. Image is a focus stack of 12 images through Helicon Focus, and it was edited in Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Topaz Denoise AI and Topaz Sharpen AI.

I don't have an exact magnification, but it would be in the range of 1.5 – 2x (approx), this would have been approximately 5-10mm in size.

Image 1: Front profile of a jumping spider.

Image 2: Side profile of a jumping spider.