What is this?
Location: Sub-tropical rainforest area, Central Coast, Australia
December 9, 2011 10:59 pm
There’s a lot of weird bugs at my boyfriend’s house that I’ve never seen before, which is interesting because I grew up only a few kilometres away on a really similar property. Still, we saw this on the roof of my car and couldn’t figure out what on earth it is. It probably looks rather unproportionate in the picture, but each one of the long arms at the front was about 1 1/2 inches long. Not only is it creepy looking, it moves really damn quick.
Help?!
Signature: – Mel
Hi Mel,
We believe this is some species of Jumping Spider in the family Salticidae. We have not had any luck determining the species.
Possible Correction
Trevor sent in a comment that he suspects because of the paired front legs that this may be a Crab Spider. There is a photo on the Brisbane Insect and Spider website that is called a Peak Crab Spider in the genus Tmarus or Sidymella that looks very similar. FlickR also has an image of Sidymella.
Not a great photo but the “paired” front legs would have me looking more into Thomosidae than Salticidae.
You are probably right Trevor. We will adjust the subject line.
http://ednieuw.home.xs4all.nl/australian/thomisidae/crabspiders.html
Runcinia acuminata
The Australian Crab Spider website had this spider that looked similar.
or maybe this one
http://www.arachne.org.au/01_cms/details.asp?viewMode=printable&ID=1972
It looks ALOT like that spider.
Thanks for your suggestions. Sadly the original photo is not of a high enough quality to be certain.
If you’re going to ask me, it doesn’t look like a regular jumping spider. This is how a jumping spider looks like: http://www.jumpingspider.net/