You're right, it's Phiddipus audax. I haven't seen them here where I live, so I'm not sure if I can find 2 of the same kind. I'll keep looking. It's surprising to me that the interest here is high. One of the clips shows someone keeping it as a pet in a huge glass container. Kinda make your austere blue plastic in small vials a bit sad looking. LOL.

We haven't seen chops revert back to normal, but the fact that it happened twice to Viper means that it can be repeated. It's very strange. It's similar to how a FS suddenly becomes chop. There's documentation now that one can lose it too. It gives the infectious disease argument even stronger...maybe a FS can heal from it, even though most don't. If I'm to guess, I would say that Thunderhawk now approaches a female normally too.

To convert normal spiders into chops, you need to catch 1 chop FS first. You can't spread it around without one that already has it.

Take the picture of the Bavia shape spider for us le. Then every one can enjoy.

Mindstorm: I looked at the sg arofanatics site. Looks more like a chat. Good camera work on the clips, but they're not as remarkable as Viper's Sigma chop FS fights. Hope you can figure out how to rear baby Lonesome.

There were some discussions on what "chop" is in the earlier pages. Nobody knows for sure what it really is. It's a marked behavioral change some Thiania bhamoensis spiders take on in their adult lives. The term "chop" is a colloquial jargon we use, for lack of a better term. The chop Thianias display hyper aggressive behavior towards other Thianias, often treating them like prey rather than competition. The males, curiously, will lose their ability to mate with a female after acquiring this "chop" attribute...they seem extremely timid around females, easily disinterested and if they decide approach they would end up pushing the female (like a face to face fight) rather than mounting her. It's like they messed up their brains.

I have proposed that it may be a CNS infection (something like rabies) because it can be spread around, and now, some documentation that they can recover from it on rare occasions.

Here are some old clips that display the difference in behavior.
Nonchops (normal behavior for Thiania bhamoensis):
Spitfire vs Hades
Bighead vs Archilles
Both spiders initially size each other up before fighting...they'll dance side to side and back and forth while showing angry faces. They will then start by pushing each other, vibrating their claws. If none of the competitors give up, they'll go the the next stage of the fight which is grappling. That's when you'll see moves like arm locking, biting and throwing. With successive stages of the fight, the risk of injury increases. In essense nonchop Thianias do not get hurt easily when they fight because they often will give up after stage 1 (angry face faceoff) or stage 2 (pushing).

Chops:
The last few weeks most of the clips involved chop fighting spiders, as Viper and Mindstorm have either caught them or converted them. You have commented on some of the brutal ones that ended up with a competitor dying.
Kelapasawit vs Bro1 slo mo
Bro1 as a chop. Note how the fight began. It went straight to stage 3. That's why injuries often happen in fights involving chops. They do not assess their opponent's size and try to scare them off. Depending on the level of "chopness", a chop spider may or may not show an angry face. It's basically a take-no-prisoners approach to fighting. However it doesn't mean that chops are hands down winners because if the opponent could withstand the initial rush attack, it's a 50-50 tussle.

Hope that helps.

The pic looks like a Phiddipus. I haven't seen any of them here, unfortunately. I saw some crab spiders and wolf spiders while weeding yesterday, quite boring.

Some of the preadult FS have a partial white face. That's my guess.

Viper, thanks for the new clips. Perfect illustrations of chop conversions of Scorpio and Hades. A bit risky allow the chops to see the other males first.

I can't tell for sure. You can train a FS male to become very aggressive due to memory of the last fights. But if you let him calm down, he can lose the hyper aggressiveness if he's not a chop. Show Mindstorm la when you see him, he can confirm for you.

Mindstorm: It's a bit sad that you only have 14-15 slings out of the 100+ eggs. Perhaps the female knows which eggs were not going to hatch and ate them. 15% yield is not good at all. What do you plan to do with them once the leave the nest?

Here's an interesting site. This Wayne Maddison guy is an absolute spider man. I looked at the pics for hours until my eyes almost popped out. There is years and years of work there.
Tree of life - Jumping spiders
The spiders are from US, Canada and South America. You may be able to triple or quadruple that if you include the ones from Asia, Europe and Australia.
The pics include Phidippus sp. It confirms my first assumption that the pic I posted is Phiddipus regius, not Phiddipus audax. It has white lines on the sides of the head which is what P. regius has.

Thiania is briefly listed, but not Bavia aericeps. Evarcha flavocincta (Hantu kuning) and Ligurra sp. (Mangrovejumper) are also briefly listed, but no pics.

There are some short mating clips of Habronattus sp. that may be interesting to look at too...part of his research. I learned that spiders are classified mostly by their teeth, haha.

What we've done certainly doesn't compare to what they have, but we have some stuff that's a lot more in depth.

Yes, that is my experience too. Most of the time there is a lag period between the fights and turning chop. Doesn't happen right away. I'm not even sure if the fights are the only way to spread it. Perhaps proximity (staying in the same nest previously inhabited by a chop) may spread it as well.

First experience with chops? Probably when I was 7 or 8 years old. I went to a neighbour's house...the whole backyard was bare, all yellow mud and sand except in the middle where there was a single big bush of pandan plant. We didn't stay very long so I only circled the bush once before I had to leave, but I caught 2 males among the pandan leaves caked with mud from the rain.
I didn't know what it was at that time, but I thought the males were drunk. They couldn't walk straight. I brought them home and fought them on the front steps of my house in JB. They would rush up to each other, grapple into a ball and roll down to the next step and walk away unhurt in separate directions without a clear winner or loser.

Come to think of it, there was a time when I was even younger...before kindergarten even...when my brother had some friends who were fighting their spiders and like all little kids, I didn't want to be left out. I had, I think...my memory is a bit fuzzy, a small male at that time, so I present it as a challenger. Unfortunately it got killed and eaten by one of their chop kings. It wasn't a personal experience though, because I never got to see the chop spider attacking and killing my spider, I couldn't get through the circle of older boys to see the action. I was told that my spider died so I cried. My brother's friend went and caught another spider as a replacement, but it turned out to be a female.

This post has been edited by Mangrovejumper: May 2 2008, 07:44 PM

Slayer clips show how screwed up chops are. He's not even recognising the female spider as a female.

I assume that the slings all didn't make it. Did you release both the Bavia aericeps? I've taken on a project similar to yours here. I took in a hatchling jumping spider that was hanging down near my computer monitor recently and I'm trying to make it my project to rear it to adulthood. It's been hard finding food for it. Even most of the aphids I found were too big. I finally found some tiny ones yesterday.

Picture is taken using the new camcorder...not bad zoom for a camcoder hey?




Attached thumbnail(s)

Nice pictures. I guess I just like all spiders. As a kid, I used to spend hours looking at those tiny web weavers on the walls and ceiling of the house make their nests and capture their prey. Of course, compared to jumping spiders they're a boring lot. Once in a while I found those palm-sized fast runners in the bathroom and it was a most exciting time and even perhaps a bit scary.

I think we're missing out if the only jumper we know of is Thiania bhamoensis and nothing else. We wouldn't have seen the natural predator capture technique at the Seremban house if we didn't pick up a random Salticidae species. We wouldn't have seen the white "Long Legs" put a leg on each other's foreheads in a fight. How about golden spiders? Male ant spiders? They chop like crazy, even get their teeth entangled when they fight. I'm still waiting for someone to record a video of Portia sp. tricking another spider to become its prey.

Whoa, I didn't know my school did research on saticidae. They must have gotten the spiders from elsewhere though, because the winters are exceptionally cold.

I've been feeding my sling a baby aphid every 2 days or so. Adult aphids are too big, so I find the tiny ones.

The flickr link is very interesting. It has boxes just like the containers we had, including the labels.

Thanks for the pics, Centaurfly. I could tell Goblin is a chop (sup pow) just by looking at it. Nice dirty face characteristic of chops.

If you go back to earlier posts by Mindstorm, there are descriptions and pics of food breeding. I agree it can be time consuming if you have to feed a lot of them as well as clean their containers individually.

Your plan of propagating the gene line is the easiest way to approach breeding, I think. Better if you're able to find some bushes that are FS-free, or clear an area of previous residents (so you can pre-select your gene line by putting only your males and females there)...and let nature take its course. Check in regularly to remove predators. Mindstorm's idea of breeding in captivity is a much tougher task.

I use a High Definition Video Cam (Canon HG10) for shooting videos here. The native quality is impressive. I say "native" because it records in AVCHD, which is not a cross-platform format. It won't play on WMP, winamp, QT or RealPlayer without a time and memory intensive conversion to MPEG or WMV (and loss of PQ).

So basically if you want to put down $$ for an HD cam, you'll have to budget for an AVCHD compatible video editing software too. The best one I've found out there is Pinnacle Studio. AVCHD files can be quite cumbersome to manipulate, so you should take that into consideration before buying your video cam.

50 years ago? Walau. I wonder spiders at that time were bigger than the ones now. I'm sure he has a few good stories to tell, hey?

Centaur:
Thanks for the pics. They are very nice macros. The Hyllus pictures look very much like the "Hantu Kuning" (Evarcha flavocincta) I used to play with, which were very good fighters. Probably a close relative.

Are you sure? I think Plexippus paykulli is a type of house spider. "Big Spider Star" is never found inside the house. They make large nests on the underside of the leaves...usually thickly webbed to the point that you can't even see the spider inside until you tear open the nest. They are also quite hand friendly, not like the house spiders that never stop jumping.

That article looks familiar, although I don't remember anything specific on it. It's good stuff, like the ability of a jumper to move their front eyes to look around. It also has the picture of the ant spiders fighting. I've only fought them once, and it's a very interesting fight. Phidippus spiders are very big. You should try putting two Bavia aericeps females together.

Marauder looks like a chop from a previous clip, I don't think you will be able to breed him. Chops just don't breed. Both Mindstorm and Viper have tried repeatedly and have not had success. Perhaps if you can get one to recover and become a normal spider, then maybe.

Stripe is a male Telemonia. Telemonias are not aggressive in nature, I think. I remember I used to catch them to be food for Ligurras (golden spiders/mangrovejumpers), many of them smaller than the Telemonias. I'm sure Mindstorm still remembers my "fui-yo" yell when a female Ligurra of mine pounced on and killed a female Telemonia twice its size.

Telamonia males are black, very different in colour than the females, just like the Bavia aericeps.

I am very impressed with Jess' blog. I didn't go back to the posts last year, but I learned something just by reading them...the behavioural differences between males and females, how slings/bubs die inexplicably, genetic differences even from the same batch of eggs. She even has the setup like yours, but with fake green plants rather than blue plastic cards.

The best thing is, after looking at the Hyllus diardi pictures, I can positively confirm that the white/grey jumper I saw many years ago was of the same type. It was one of the two biggest spiders I've seen. The body length was probably over 1 inch/2.5cm long. And she did move very slowly, just like what Jess described.

As far as leaf size goes, I have a feeling it's more of a belief rather than a fact that larger leaves house larger FS. I think as long as the leaves are of sufficient size, it will have FS of all sizes. The habitat does influence the colour of the FS, natural camouflage of the surroundings. I agree the the colour isn't really a good indicator of a good fighter. Regardless of colour, chops rank right at the top for their fighting skills.

I am now keeping two slings. They're house spiders so it's nothing interesting to look at, but they're the only jumping spiders that I can find here. I'm going to document how long they live and how many times they moult. It's been a chore finding insects small enough for the tiny one. Even the smallest aphids are too thick skinned. It would try to pounce on one, then bounce off because the fangs are too small.

I managed to find some time to get a few pics of the female jumper I got from Yosemite National Park. It's not much, but at least I got some contribution into this thread.

Yosemite has some big redwood trees. They are so big that people look like toothpicks standing under them if I am to capture the top of the tree in a picture.


I found a nest not too far from a wet meadow. It had hatched slings residing with the small female. There was a bear cub looking for food there, so we didn't linger for long, fearing that the mother bear may be nearby.


For lack of a better name, I called her "Female". I got her in a big cereal container. She hardly comes out and I think she ate all the slings in there.


Feeding time.


This post has been edited by Mangrovejumper: Oct 6 2008, 08:15 AM

Actually the male becomes weaker after mating. You can train pengecut males using a smaller male though, using one of Viper's patented techniques.

Thanks for the posts. It was an enjoyable trip and not as hot as the last time.
The failure to catch any chop this time around is a good indication of how hard it is to find a chop. It's so much easier to convert them than to find them in the wild.

The first king was initially named Ampang4. I'm not very creative with names. I'm having a hard time coming up with the two I have right now, including Baby (house spider I've kept for 8 months now, still a baby) and the one the Hyllus I brought back on this trip. Hopefully I can get the Hyllus to adulthood, although I think it's a different species (not H. diardi) than Drag0nette's so it will be smaller.

Here are some of my pics to contribute to the thread.
1. Hantu Kuning (Evarcha flavocincta) female.
2. Hantu Kuning male eating small fighting spider male.
3. Unidentified jumper eating a big bluebottle fly.


Attached thumbnail(s)