How to Handle a Jumping Spider (And Why Its Eyesight Matters)

Jumping spiders are different from most spiders kept as pets, and the difference starts with how they hunt.

A Visual Hunter, Not a Web Builder

Unlike the web-building spiders most people picture, jumping spiders are active visual hunters. They have unusually good eyesight for a spider, built around large, forward-facing eyes that let them track and stalk prey before pouncing, sometimes leaping many times their own body length to catch it. They do produce silk, but only for draglines and a small retreat, not for trapping food.

What Handling Looks Like

Curious and bold, jumping spiders track movement and generally aren't aggressive toward people, bites are rare and medically trivial when they do happen. Even so, minimal handling is the right approach. If you do handle one, let it walk freely onto and off your hand instead of grabbing or restraining it. They're fragile, and a fall onto a hard surface can badly injure one. Always handle low, over a soft surface.

The larger species can bite, and a regal jumping spider generally does so only when it is held tightly. The bite feels like a sharp sting that fades within a few minutes and needs no treatment.

A Session, Step by Step

1. Open the enclosure and lay an open hand flat in front of the spider.
2. Let it walk on at its own pace. Never grab, pinch, or scoop.
3. Keep the other hand ready as a bridge. When the spider heads for the edge, place the second hand in front of it and let it step across.
4. Sit over a bed, carpet, or couch cushion, never over a hard floor.
5. Keep the first sessions short, with breaks, and lengthen them only as the spider settles.

A spider that leaps off drops on a dragline, the silk safety line it trails behind it to break a fall.

Reading Its Mood

A spider that raises its two front legs toward you is in a defensive posture. That ends the session. Pushing on only makes the spider more defensive, so return it and try again in a day or two.

When Not to Handle

• In premolt, when the spider has stopped eating and turned sluggish. Handling now risks a stuck molt.
• During a molt, and until the spider is moving and eating normally again afterward.
• Right after it arrives, until it has settled into the enclosure.

First-Timer Mistakes

• Dropping or injuring a spider during handling.
• Using a heat mat without a thermostat, which can give the spider heatstroke.
• Letting the enclosure run too dry, which is the husbandry failure behind both dehydration and failed molts.

How This Compares to Other Spiders

Web-building spiders wait for prey to come to them. Jumping spiders go get it, actively stalking and pouncing rather than trapping. The regal jumping spider specifically is the largest jumping spider in eastern North America. Day to day interaction looks almost nothing like it does with the other arachnids in the hobby: a tarantula is best left in its enclosure and moved with a catch cup, and an emperor scorpion is steered with tongs.

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Sources & Further Reading