A Week's Worth of Thistle

Episode 3

 On a particularly windy day, I checked on the thistle plant to find a new drama unfolding. Two metallic spiders were signaling back and forth. The smaller, green spider I took to be the male and the larger, dark purple I figured was a female. They looked like jumping spiders, but with long abdomens that made me think of ants. They were so focused on each other, I even managed to get a video of the male attempting the court the female, and then fleeing for his life when she charged forward.

 I figured that there would be at least some research done on these guys since they're so brilliantly colored and somewhat charismatic. Nope. All I found was a video on youtube with little to no information. I had to dig through a dichotomous key just to find the scientific name Tutelina elegans, which after plugging in to Google Scholar, gave me only papers that list jumping spiders in different states. After digging around some more, I found just a snippet of information saying that they are ant mimics that specialize in hunting them. This is interesting since ants are usually tough and sometimes toxic, so most spiders avoid them.

This lack of a common name and life history, shows just how little we know of the invertebrate world. How can we claim so much about the world around us, and yet not pay attention to the smaller creatures that abound right under our noses? It's things like this that push me towards the study of insects, since there obviously are holes in the information we claim to have.