Whitman's jumping spider
Phidippus whitmani
Name means: “named after the American zoologist Charles Otis Whitman”
Whitman's jumping spider is a small, furry spider that leaps instead of building webs to catch food. The male is bright red with a white stripe on its back. The female is often brown, but in the south she can be red too.
Fun fact: spiders are not insects. Insects have six legs, spiders have eight. Everyone calls them bugs anyway!
Lives in
The eastern and central USA and southeastern Canada, in old leafy forests
What does it eat?
It sneaks up on small insects and jumps on them.
How fast is it?
A garden snail about 0.05 km/h (0.03 mph)
A tortoise about 0.3 km/h (0.19 mph)
Whitman's jumping spider about 0.8 km/h (0.5 mph)
A person walking about 5 km/h (3.1 mph)
cool stuff
Fun facts
1
The male has white hairs on his front legs and a black band across his eyes.
2
These spiders grow up in May or June, and females lay eggs in July and August.
3
It likes to live in fallen leaves and on low plants in old forests.
you asked
Most asked questions about Whitman's jumping spider
?Where does Whitman's jumping spider live?
In the eastern and central USA and in Canada, in leafy forests.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Phidippus whitmani
- Group
- Spiders
- Family
- Salticidae
- Classification
- Arachnida > Araneae > Salticidae
- Lives on
- North America
Where the facts come from
- Phidippus whitmani (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Thomas Shahan. CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons. The sticker of this bug is drawn from this picture.
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