Seven new peacock spider species found in Australia

If you enjoy dancing like Uma Thurman, or if you just happen to enjoy bright colors, great news: Seven new species of peacock spiders have been found in Australia.

Some people might not be extremely thrilled at this news, but peacock spiders aren’t your standard arachnid fare. First off, they’re not harmful to humans. Second, they really don’t act like normal spiders.

“They behave very differently to how people think a spider does … they behave more like cats and dogs, moving around, perceiving and reacting to their environment,” Jürgen Otto, a biologist from Sydney who has been researching peacock spiders since 2005, told The Guardian.

Third, they’re weirdly, well, cute. Ranging from one to two tenths of an inch (2.5 to 5 mm) long, these rainbow-bright spiders dance to attract mates. But they don’t just shimmy from side to side like must people awkwardly do at the club—they more go full-on Gangnam Style.

Just try to be afraid of this:

“Each one of these species has an interesting mating behavior,” Otto told The Huffington Post. “The males usually have flaps on the side of the body that they can expand to reveal their colourful, patterned abdomen. The female sits close to the male and watches him. If a female likes a particular colour or variant, she will mate with that male. That is how these beautiful patterns evolve.”

With the addition of seven new peacock spiders, which can be found in Otto’s paper in the international jumping spider Peckhamia, the grand total now is 48 species within the Maratus genus. They’re found all across Australia, but are especially common in Western Australia—although their diminutive stature makes them a challenge to find. In fact, Otto—whose day job involves studying mites for the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources—only first came across one while walking in Australia’s Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park.

“I’m always looking on the ground when I walk around, mostly for mites and other small things, and I almost stepped on this little spider. That’s what started my passion,” he told The Guardian.

“If you know what you’re looking for, you can find them,” he added. “But I have to be careful not to lose them – particularly the babies – and not to squash them.”

In short, peacock spiders are nothing to fear.

“They’re colorful, they’re adorable, and even people who hate spiders—extreme arachnophobes—love these spiders,” said Otto. “They can’t help it.”

PLUS:

One of the new species, Maratus splendens, with fingernail for size:

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Image credit: Jürgen C. Otto  and David E. Hill 

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