Zebra jumping spider

Where does the zebra jumping spider live?

Home: Sunny walls, fences and rocks across the northern half of the world.

In the wild it lives in these countries: Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Poland, the Netherlands, the United States, Canada, Russia.

The short profile

Fully grown: females 5-9 mm, males 5-6 mm. It weighs about 0 kilograms. On the menu: meat.

The story behind it

A zebra spider hunts the way a cat does. It creeps closer in short bursts, turns its whole body to keep the prey in view, and then leaps. The jump is not powered by muscle at all: the spider pumps body fluid into its back legs so fast that they snap straight, which flings it forward at up to about three quarters of a metre per second. Before every leap it fastens a thread of silk behind it, so a miss ends with the spider dangling safely instead of falling. It takes flies, mosquitoes and moths, sometimes up to three times its own length. In spring the males wave their striped front legs and bob their bodies in a slow dance, and a female only lets a good dancer come close.

Find it on the globe

Zebra jumping spider is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.