Tiny Golden Jumping Spider, Who Are You?

Let's find out.

 I just flippin' love living in the Information Age. It is the perfect place and time for a Science Chimp to flourish and thrive. Even five years ago, if I had put my hand on the garden gate and seen a tiny iridescent golden jumping spider leap to the next post, I would have bent down, studied it, run inside to my woefully inadequate shelf of invertebrate field guides (well, they're great for big flashy butterflies, and the Kaufman Insect Guide has delighted me again and again, but I didn't have that five years ago), and I would have sadly concluded that it was a really neat little golden jumping spider and wished hard that I knew its true name.                                                     

  This thing was tiny and very shy and I had a devil of a time getting pictures of it.  They don't begin to capture its mystery and elegance. It looked like it was made of molten gold with a pinkish-lilac sheen that changed depending on how the light hit it.

I kept herding it around with my fingers and sticking the Canon G-11 right down on top of it and finally got some acceptable pictures before it disappeared into the marjoram, thoroughly disgusted at my presumption.

 

I stored the photos away until a golden Tuesday evening with the scissorgrinder cicadas competing lustily with lawnmowers and children laughing in the town green. An evening after a week of houseguests and cooking and wild wonderful music and pure fun. An evening when I could finally think about tiny gold jumping spiders and wonder what they might be.

I went to bugguide.net.  I typed "golden jumping spider" in the search box. And up popped matching photos of the gold jumping spider Tutelina elegans.  And I marveled that this could work. And marveled that I, an armchair Linnaeus, had already named it the same thing, minus the Latin. But the Latin is the key; the Latin is what will give me more. I have found out that they eat carpenter ants, but not a lot more. But that, at least, is a start.

My Webby peregrinations led me to a wonderful site tended by an old friend named Dick Walton.  Well, imagine that. I haven't seen him since the late '80's, at an Association of Field Ornithologists meeting where I was showing some very early paintings. He's making amazing videos of all manner of small creatures on his web site, Natural History Services. Here's his video of Tutelina elegans doing its thing. Watching it, you can appreciate the wonder of finding a tiny, shining golden-purple spider on a garden gate. Watching it, you can feel the enormity of knowing there's this huge, huge web of people pumping information out into the universe for no other reason than the love of knowing. Thank you, Dick. Thank you, Bugguide biologists. Thank you, Web. Thank you, Universe.