Animal vision: Eight-eyed marvels

While the name ‘jumping spider’ may conjure up terrifying visions of lethal attack by gargantuan, hairy brown arachnids of the kind beloved by horror movies, the reality is something quite different. Jumping spiders are, for want of a better word, cute. They are fluffy, brightly coloured and, at less than half the size of a human fingernail, they are not likely to pose a threat to anything bigger than a fruit fly. Oh, and they dance, but more on that later.

Fancy footwork aside, jumping spiders have the most acute vision of any land invertebrate. In fact, their acuity is similar to ours. So despite being only a fraction of the size of our entire eyeball, jumping spiders see the world in a similar level of detail to us. Actually, despite having a completely different ocular setup to ours (did I mention the eight eyes?) fundamentally their vision works in a similar way to our own. So how do they do it?