White-Jawed Jumping Spider

Fascinating facts about the White-Jawed Jumping Spider

• When Nicholas Marcellus Hentz first described the spider in 1846 he gave the male the name Attus mitratus, but he assigned the female to a separate species called Attus morigerus because he did not recognise they were the same organism. Later taxonomic work showed the two descriptions referred to a single species, uniting the male and female under the name Hentzia mitrata.
• The species name mitrata translates from Latin as "wearing a mitre" or "capped", a nod to the distinctive coloured cap-like pattern on its cephalothorax. The cephalothorax indeed shows a reddish-brown colour that extends across the ocular region to the posterior margin.
• Hentzia mitrata occupies a broad swathe of eastern North America, beginning in southeastern Canada and extending through the eastern United States before reaching as far west as Nebraska. It has also been recorded from the Bahamas.
• Male white-jawed jumping spiders have a leg formula of 1-4-2-3, with the first pair markedly longer than the others and covered in a dense fringe of white hairs. Their pedipalps are unusually shaped, with a patella as long as the tibia and a tarsus that widens dramatically at the front, forming a twisted tube used during mating.

Sources

Every fact above was checked against these pages, and kept only where one of them states it.

• Wikipedia

At a glance

About the White-Jawed Jumping Spider

In the scorching expanse of sun-baked rocks and dusty crevices, the White-Jawed Jumping Spider dances with reckless abandon, its iridescent white jaws glinting like tiny beacons as it springs from crag to crag with breathtaking agility. With eyes that shimmer like polished onyx, this diminutive arachnid navigates its arid realm with an uncanny precision, its eight legs a blur of motion as it pursues the unsuspecting flies that dare to enter its domain. As it leaps and bounds across the rocky terrain, the White-Jawed Jumping Spider embodies a mesmerizing fusion of elegance and ferocity, a true marvel of evolutionary ingenuity.

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