Flying Peacock Spider

• GeneralThe male spreads a coloured fan on his abdomen and dances for the female.
• Its abdomen holds the deepest black measured in any animal: microstructures absorb up to 99.9% of the light, which makes the adjoining colours look more intense still.
• If the female is not convinced by the dance, which can last almost an hour, she may devour the male.
• The name volans, meaning flying, comes from the initial and mistaken belief that it used the flaps of its abdomen to glide.
• It measures between 3 and 5 millimetres and stars in one of the most elaborate courtships known in an arthropod.
• The male unfurls an abdominal fan of iridescent colours, waves his third pair of legs above his body, drums with his pedipalps and rocks from side to side. The display can last fifty minutes.
• And it is not just visual: he simultaneously sends vibrations through the substrate, which the female senses with mechanosensory hairs. It is multimodal signalling, and both channels count towards her acceptance.
• Its blues are not pigment: they come from photonic nanostructures in the scales of the fan, which diffract light and produce an iridescence that shifts with the viewing angle. The cream and red tones are pigmentary.
• Its vision is exceptional for an arthropod: the central eyes have a multilayered retina and spectral filters that allow it to discriminate colour, just what is needed to judge a male's fan.
• It leaps up to forty times its body length, and that jump is also its hunting method.
• The epithet volans means flying, after the wing-like look of the unfurled fan, but it does not fly.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (arachnid)

Habitat & environment

Dry scrub and grassland

Sources consulted: Girard, Kasumovic y Elias (2011), PLOS ONE; Encyclopaedia Britannica; Otto y Hill, revisiones del género Maratus

Best time: Southern spring, August to December, during courtship