Red-backed jumping spider

Red-backed jumping spider
As a kid, I was always curious about the living creatures around me.  I had a passion for learning about them and read anything I could get my hands on which helped me understand their beguiling ways.  It was that same love for all organisms and my desire to learn about them which led me to do a bachelor's degree in zoology through my hometown university.  That eventually led me into teaching and now, that I have retired, still fuels my spirit of inquiry.  It has been a life long obsession, one which never ebbed.

Today I was enjoying the sun on a patio where I was visiting and noticed an unfamiliar spider moving about on a barbeque.  It took only a few seconds for me to go over and examine it.  It was a jumping spider, a type of arachnid which doesn't trap prey in a silken snare but rather by pouncing.  Fortunately, the red back it had made it easy to look it up on the web (the internet, not the spider's).  This eight-legged mystery was called, appropriately enough, the red-backed jumping spider.  We do not have them where I live, but here in Nanaimo they appear to be common.

The one above is a male; the females have a black stripe running longitudinally through their red back.  They live up to two years and grow to a maximum size of about two centimeters.  Their bite is not dangerous to humans; for their prey, it is an entirely different thing.

I brought a macro lens with me and shot the creature with my 105 mm lens mounted on a APS-C crop sensor camera.  I used an external hot-shoe mounted flash with a wide angle diffuser in place to allow the beam to reach the subject.  The aperture was f/36 with a shutter speed of 1/250th of a second.  I took about 40 shots in all.

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