Friday Invertebrate Blogging: Jumping Spider

This is a Jumping Spider (click the pic to enlarge), from the family Salticidae. When I first saw it, I thought it was a jumping spider from recent photos of similar appearing spiders, but I was not sure exactly which characteristics of the spider made it so. Here is a link to the site I used to ID this spider. This is the key part of the description: "Square-fronted cephalothorax bearing four very large anterior eyes. Legs usually short and stout with the first pair sometimes enlarged". The Wikipedia entry is also very descriptive. When I saw the family name, Salticidae, I immediately thought of a word with the same root, saltatory, as in saltatory conduction. Which is the means by which action potentials travel along myelinated nerve fibers, JUMPING from node (of Ranvier) to node.

Don't forget to check out Modulator's Friday Ark!