Zoologger is our weekly column highlighting extraordinary animals – and occasionally other organisms – from around the world

Species: Jotus remus

Habitat: Trees and leaf debris on a mountain plateau in the Barrington Tops National Park, New South Wales, Australia

Males of a newly discovered species of jumping spider spend hours waving special paddle-shaped legs at prospective mates.

Mating can potentially cost you your life if you are a male spider. To avoid attack, Jotus remus plays a game first to find a receptive, non-aggressive female.

It begins when a male positions himself on the other side of a leaf to a female, and starts sticking a paddle out from underneath and waving it at her. When the female tries to pounce on what she thinks is prey, the male darts across to the other side, and repeats the paddle action.


Jürgen Otto of the Australian Department of Agriculture in Sydney, who discovered the species last year in New South Wales, only observed mating – which happened within minutes – when he paired males with virgin females on a leaf.

Those females who had previously mated attacked the paddle for longer without ever mating, with the game only ending when either the male gave up or the female departed. “The cat-and-mouse game [sometimes] goes on for hours,” says Otto. “I don’t know of any other spider with paddles like these, or with such behaviour.”

Otto and his co-author David Hill, editor of the journal Peckhamia that published the findings, have named the species J. remus, meaning “oar” or “paddle” in Latin. Males have two hairy paddles, the third leg from the front on each side, and at first Otto and Hill were stumped by their possible function.

Spiders are known to travel through air and water. But Otto’s tests ruled out a role in swimming or parachuting from trees. The breakthrough came when he observed males and females together.

Otto suspects that even though the male can’t see the female, he can tell through leaf vibrations when she is supine and receptive to mating.

“The whole procedure is for males to find a female that stops attacking him, and that’s the signal she wants to mate,” he says.

Although the unique paddle-legs look unwieldy, Otto says that they don’t appear to hamper hunting. “I can’t see them being an impediment to hunting, because the spiders are very fast and agile in catching prey,” he says.

Eagle eyes

Otto owes his discovery to a stroke of luck, plus an eagle eye for detail. His first sight of these 5-millimetre-long spiders was on a tent bag when he unpacked his camping gear after a hiking trip a year ago to Barrington Tops. “At first I thought it was the same as many other hunting spiders common in Australia, but then I noticed it had strange legs,” he says.

Initially, Otto wasn’t sure if the spider came from his own garden or was a stowaway on the camping gear. So he drove back to the area where he had camped and found several additional specimens, including females, which he brought back for further investigation.

How widespread the species is has yet to be established. “It might be that it’s unique to the mountaintop area where I found it, but who knows?” says Otto.

Journal reference: Peckhamia, 133.1

Read more: “Spider Santa: Nicer gift-wrap, better sex”

Image and GIF credit: Jürgen Otto

Correction: Since this article was first published, we have made several changes to better reflect the fact that males paddle to gauge a female’s interest in mating, and that the interested females mate within minutes.