(All images by Jürgen Otto)

I think this is close to being a national scandal. Look at these beauties! Peacock spiders are stunning, with courtship displays to match anything in a David Attenborough documentary. So why aren’t these animals more widely known in their home country of Australia?

It’s a mystery to the man who knows them best. “They are 3 to 5 millimetres in length and people simply don’t expect such beauty and complexity from something that small, let alone something that is a spider,” says Jürgen Otto.

Maratus elephans


The one above was only named while we were writing up this piece. It is, to mix animal metaphors, the elephant peacock spider, Maratus elephans, dubbed for the pattern on its abdomen that looks like an elephant’s face. With this species, there are now 38 peacock spiders that have been formally named, and Otto says there are at least 25 more waiting to be officially named and described.

Otto is a mite biologist at the Australian Department of Agriculture in Sydney, but peacock spiders have become his passion. He is puzzled as to why they weren’t more widely documented until he started doing so in 2008. “These spiders aren’t particularly rare in Australia – they occur from Melbourne all along the coast into northern Queensland. They can be observed close to all major population centres: Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, as well as Perth in the west.”

He predicts that the spiders will soon become as iconic for Australian wildlife as kangaroos and koalas. “What is fascinating is how they change people’s perception of spiders in general. Many people contact me and confess to being arachnophobes, but they tell me that watching my videos is helping them to overcome their fear of spiders,” Otto says.

Even for arachnophobes, it would be difficult not to find these spiders cute. “Cute is probably the most common attribute that people apply to them,” Otto says, “and my hope is once that has happened, there is a chance it will rub off onto their less colourful cousins. It will take some time: spiders have had a bad rap for a very long time and videos aimed at scaring people far outnumber those like mine designed to do the opposite.”

Maratus sceletus, also known as Skeletorus

In large part thanks to Otto’s efforts in documenting them(check out facebook.com/PeacockSpider), there are now some 58 known species of peacock spider. The two most recently discovered, from south-east Queensland, are Maratus sceletus, nicknamed Skeletorus (above), and Maratus jactatus, which goes by the nickname Sparklemuffin (below).

Maratus jactatus, also known as Sparklemuffin

Otto loves them, and it’s hard not to feel the same way. His passion started quite by chance, on a stroll with his family in 2005. As a trained mite specialist, he is used to looking for small organisms, and noticed a nimble and iridescent little spider on the path. When he tried to identify it later, he found it in a book from the 1970s, in which it was called the “gliding spider”. It was then believed that the species, now known as Maratus volans, could fly.

“I was intrigued by the idea that the spider I photographed may be able to fly,” Otto says. “And watching it jumping so quickly, I believed the story myself at first.” But later he found that a related species, now named Maratus pavonis had been described in the 1950s as using flaps on its abdomen to signal to females in a dazzling courtship display.

But no one at the time took any notice, and the myth of the flying spider continued into the 21st century.

Eventually, Otto published the first photos of Maratus volans displaying, and the news about these marvellous animals started to spread.

Otto collaborated with other experts and started publishing papers on peacock spiders (many can be seen here). As well as documenting new species, he has made new discoveries, such as finding that males of the Maratus vespertilio species perform hopping contests, and that some species have spinnerets – the organs used to make silk – that they inflate and wiggle during courtship.

“Since finding my first peacock spider in 2005, I cannot stop photographing and filming them. There are so many aspects that fascinate me about them, such as their cat-like behaviour, the way they approach and catch prey…”

Watch the courtship display on one of Otto’s many videos.

In a typical display, the male tentatively signals to the female and gingerly approaches her: it’s hard not to anthropomorphise. “It’s the way they react to each other,” says Otto, “It seems intelligent and similar to the way we react. You can see them excited, curious, fearful – emotions that we associate with ourselves. Just watch a male approaching a female prior to mating and tell me that this isn’t moving to the human observer.”

Otto, who compares the courtship behaviour of peacock spiders to that of birds of paradise, has also been breeding the tiny arachnids. “Raising the young has also been quite a rewarding experience,” he says. “When they emerge from the egg sac, they are still very small and fragile; so fragile, in fact, that it becomes a challenge to photograph them without losing or squashing them. When I show these pictures to people, they are usually blown away by their cuteness.”

He wants to document peacock spiders all over Australia, and hopes that we will get a better understanding of why they evolved into such an array of species.

“I would hope that some of this knowledge will contribute to protecting the habitats they live in,” Otto says. “It is difficult to make people feel strongly about invertebrates to the extent that they want to protect them, but with these spiders there is a good chance that this will happen.”