Why Jumping Spiders Spend All Night Hanging Out—Literally
Little is known about the night-time habits of tiny creatures all around us. Take the jumping spider--it mysteriously can spend much of the night suspended in mid-air, hanging by a thread.
Jumping spiders, which use their four pairs of big eyes to spot prey so that they can pounce, can spend a lot of the night just hanging aroundâliterally.
The gorilla jumping spider, Evarcha arcuata, frequently hangs by a single thread at night, suspended in mid-air for hours. Researchers suspect these visually-oriented spiders may cope with darkness by switching to a strategy that lets them use vibrations as a warning signal of danger.
"Maybe they use this silk as a kind of an alarm system or, who notes that this new finding shows how science seems to know very little about the night-time resting habits of tiny critters, even common ones.
