The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.
~Mark Van Doren
Melissa was producing a short video on trees as part of her museum educational offerings for teachers when she made a fascinating discovery. While filming the segment, she was encouraging folks to observe trees in their neighborhood and look for interesting things living on them. When she grabbed a hickory leaf and looked at it, she found one of my favorite spiders – a Magnolia Green Jumper (Lyssomanes viridis). We have a lot of these beautiful little jumping spiders in our yard and woods, but this was one even more exciting than usual as it has just molted.
I have posted on these amazing arthropods a couple of times in the past, But here was a spider shed and a freshly molted spider together on the leaf where this magic had just occurred. If you look closely, you can see how the spiders’ cephalothorax (the fused first two body parts) pops open during the molting process and the old legs split open. The spider is then able to pull itself out of its old skin as a larger version of itself. Some spiders hang from a silk thread when they do this, but it looks like this species makes a silk pad to anchor its old body, and then crawls out as a new spider.
This one is a male as you can see by the enlarged tips to its pedipalps (those appendages that look like two short legs right in front of its face). Male spiders typically have swollen tips (often described as boxing gloves) that they transfer their sperm to before mating. I guess it is safer to keep your distance during courtship if you are a male spider (especially since you are usually smaller than your ravenous mate). After a couple of shots, I brought the spider inside for a photo shoot in my collapsible white box. I’m still learning the tricks of photographing on white backgrounds, but it does often highlight details you may not otherwise notice.
One of the issues in a white box is the creatures don’t tend to take direction very well, but this little guy finally settled and looked straight at me for a couple of quick portraits.
One of the things I love the most about these spiders is how it is really easy to see the retinas in the large eyes on front move around inside as they spider looks around (the lenses are fixed to the the carapace, but the retinas inside can be moved by tiny muscles). When the eyes become dark, the spider is looking directly at you (I think this guy is looking at my pandemic haircut). After a couple more shots, I took him back outside to patrol the yard in his new duds.
Roads End Naturalist 
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