Abstract

Jumping spiders have long fascinated biologists and lay people alike with their visually striking, sexually dimorphic color patterns and courtship displays, which suggest strong sexual selection in this group. Yet biologists have little understanding of the evolutionary forces shaping what these signals actually look like. My group has been working in recent years to try to understand what drives the evolution of the specific color and achromatic contrasts found in salticid color patterns, focusing on Mediterranean beardfooted and Australian peacock jumping spiders. What role do the color sensitivities of salticids and their predators play in shaping the colors of their sexual signals? Can red coloration, rather counterintuitively, be camouflaging? Do salticids possess an “aesthetic sense” (or visual processing bias) for the spatial statistics of natural scenes? If so, does this drive sexual signals to evolve similar statistics?