In a lab at the University of Florida, researchers are giving male jumping spiders a makeover. After knocking them unconscious for a few minutes with carbon dioxide, the scientists paint the bright-red faces of Habronattus pyrrithrix black with liquid eyeliner, or stick false eyelashes to the heads of Maevia inclemens with Elmer’s glue. Welcome to Extreme Makeover: Arachnid Edition.

But … why? The jumping spider is already more of a showman than other species, known for its dance-heavy mating rituals—lots of emphasis on arm waving, à la one of those dancing inflatable men. By tweaking the males’ appearance, the Taylor Lab is helping tease apart the complexities of the jumping spiders' flirtation.

Taylor Lab/University of Florida Taylor Lab/University of Florida

A male Habronattus pyrrithrix lives with the unenviable knowledge that he is both a potential mate and a potential meal. You see, female jumping spiders are incorrigible cannibals—if he doesn’t do something right, he could end up in her stomach. He would do well, then, to send the right signals.

So what might those signals be? Well, they're mixed: Habronattus pyrrithrix males have enchanting red faces, which happens to be a color that signals toxicity in prey. But an especially rosy complexion can also signal that a male is healthy. “If we give them a really good diet, their faces become brighter,” says Lisa Taylor, a behavioral ecologist who runs the lab. “That all suggests that females should be paying attention to color.”

To figure out whether they were noticing, the researchers presented female spiders with male suitors who were either bare-faced or painted over with black liquid eyeliner (Urban Decay, if you must know). The data is still trickling in, but Taylor is finding that female spiders are indeed less likely to attack males with red faces versus their face-painted peers.

This suggests a red face is a kind of double signal. Well-fed males are redder, which may be a sign of their fitness. But red also acts as a deterrent, tapping into a female’s aversion to a color that typically screams I’m toxic. “One is like, I have to tell you how good I am, and the other one is, OK, I'm going to do all these things so you don't eat me,” says UC Berkeley behavioral ecologist Damian Elias, who also studies jumping spiders.

Taylor’s lab is also working with Maevia inclemens, a species of jumping spider whose males wear little crowns, known as tufts. The bigger the male gets, the taller this tuft gets. “This might allow a male to clearly indicate how tall he is,” Taylor says. “It's kind of a signal that would be clear and easy for females to assess.”

These experiments are also still ongoing, but the researchers have been gluing false eyelashes to the tops of the males' heads. Not, like, a whole eyeful of lashes—that'd be bigger than the spider—but the individual clumps of synthetic lash sold by companies like Ardell, cut down to the right size with dissection scissors. “We know that bigger males have larger tufts, so that at least provides initial support for the idea that these tufts contain information for females,” says Taylor. “Whether or not females are paying attention to them, we're not sure yet.”

There are some males in this species, though, that skip the tufts and instead wave black-and-white-striped legs to get the female’s attention and to perhaps signal toxicity. To test the female’s reaction to black and white, the lab outfitted termites with tiny striped capes. “We know that females will look at the striped termites quicker, so it seems like the pattern of bold black-and-white stripes gets the female's attention,” says Taylor. “But you would think if something gets a female's attention, it would also elicit more attacks, and that doesn't happen.” In black-and-white-striped males, then, the patterning may work as an attention-grabbing device that stops short of garnering too much attention—i.e., cannibalism.