Tiny Jumper

Identification – salticidae Cosmophasis sp.

Just as I was leaving the house for a safari, it started to rain. But, the blip monster was looking out for me and placed the tiniest of jumping spiders, about 3mm length, on my bikes speedometer.

The spider was very active and fast, so first, I set the camera to shutter priority so that I could have 250th sec on flash and set the focus to minimum distance. This meant that the depth of field was going to be less than 0.5mm and shooting one handed would be very unsteady, so lots of images would be required to get a decent shot.

I then chased the spider onto the back of my hand, so that the hairs would slow him down and give some scale perspective. Once he crossed the hairy part, I would place my right hand about 2” away and he would jump across, then repeat with my left hand and start again. If I put my hand close enough for the spider to run onto, it would be scared away. To focus, I simply moved my left hand in and out.

A couple of neighbours walked past looking very puzzled, wondering why I was taking so many photos of my hand.

This genus of spiders has proven to be very difficult to identify to species level. I actually have ten variations of the genus. Some of them will be paired male and female, but I suspect one or two might be new species around the Bandung area. A couple of them have been posted by other photographers in the area on the project Noah site, so there are plenty around, but still no ID.

Computer update – To temporarily solve the mouse problem (computer), I downloaded all the data from my external drive to the laptop internal HD. This released a USB port on the laptop for a direct connection away from the hub. The performance is still not perfect, but infinitely better than it was yesterday. I can still try changing USB ports to see if that makes any difference.

I haven’t messed around with the IRQ’s yet, as I am in the middle of a large software download, which has taken two days and I didn’t want to risk disturbing it.

Dave