Jumping spiders are solitary creatures and must be kept in an enclosure on their own. Putting two of them together would result in a fight to the death and one of them being eaten by the other and the possibly the death of both of them if they manage to bite each others. Unfortunately, there have been some Tiktoks and other social media posts where the spider's owners have shown multiple spiders being allowed outside of their enclosures to “mingle & play” together. Please don’t ever try this yourself as 9 times out of 10 it won’t end well. They do have venom although it’s not medically significant to us, and nobody has ever died from a jumping spider bite (as far as we know. The chances of anyone having died are closer to zero, but for legal reasons, I have to say “as far as we know”). Jumping spiders have the ability to jump up to 50 times their own body length! To help put that in perspective, imagine being able to jump 10 times your height. You’d be able to leap over buildings in one single bound!

I highly recommend misting your enclosure once a day, daily. The main reason is, that you want to be sure you provide jumping spiders with something to drink. As they’ll drink from the water droplets. But that’s not always feasible, a day or so in-between misting will be fine. Be sure to not too heavily mist your enclosure. Especially when it comes to slings, large water droplets can cause your slings to drown. But how? Jumping spiders have what is known as booklungs, on the underside of their abdomen. This is how they breathe, getting trapped in a water droplet can and will result in drowning. These can be found online in their pupa stage and are known as castors. These take up the least room and require little care, they can be stored in the fridge until you need them and are relatively cheap for the amount you get. The biggest issue with these is hatching them successfully and I aren’t afraid to admit that I have issues with this. Some people seem to be naturals at it, whilst others just aren’t. To trigger the fly to hatch you take a few out of the fridge and pop in a small container with holes, then put the container somewhere warm. Within a few days they will hatch. If only it were that simple for all of us! For this reason it’s hard to have a reliable supply of flies as some hatch, and some don’t. I have a video tutorial in the blog section from a friend of mine who shows you how he hatches his flies. Jumping spiders have amazing eyesight for a creature that small. In fact, their eyesight is only 5-10 times less than a human's eyesight. How crazy is that! When using any type of electric heating equipment you MUST also get a thermostat to control the temperature. I’ve seen and heard some horror stories where people haven’t connected a thermostat and the consequences range from an overheated dehydrated pet, to some being cooked alive, and the worst case scenario of the house burning down. I sound dramatic I know, but these heat mats can get super hot if allowed to run continuously at full power, and I know thermostats are the most expensive part of the set up, but it’s a small price to pay to ensure you don’t kill your spider at best, and burn your house down at worst.

Spider's paws (yes their feet are actually called paws, how cute!) are incredibly sensitive and just like human hands, their paws can feel things like temperature, airflow, direction, movement, and vibrations, and if some scientists are correct, they can even feel the blood pumping through our veins as well as our bioelectrical current. Basically, it’s a super weird sensation when they touch our skin! Imagine you're standing on a train platform and one comes belting past without stopping at the station. All that noise and vibration, the heat of the train engines, the warm air as its disturbed, and the wind it all creates, that’s the comparison I use for how it must feel to a jumping spider when being handled by us. Similar to how we get used to being in train stations, your jumping spider may also get used to being handled by you. You can also put green bottle flies in the fridge for a few minutes before feeding to your spider to slow them down and make them easier to catch. These can be fed from 4th - 7th instar depending on the size and species of the spider. Molting for a jumping spider is a very crucial stage in their life, like a milestone if you will. Jumping spiders molt between 6-9 times in their lifetime. But don’t be alarmed, it’s a natural occurrence that will continue to happen until a spider reaches maturity. Molting happens when a spider outgrows and sheds its exoskeleton. A lot like us as humans, spiders too have skeletons only they wear theirs on the outside of their bodies. Females are usually slightly larger than their male counterparts as they’re a little chunkier in the butt, with the males being more athletically built and having slightly longer legs at the front. They’re very cheap to buy considering how many you get, and really easy to care for as they’ll eat just about anything. They take up little space, but they can smell a bit in my opinion. They’re also quite fatty and not the best nutritionally for your spider. It’s advised to feed these only as a treat or part of a varied diet occasionally.

Once you have a suitable enclosure you can start thinking of how to decorate it for your spider. There are many differing opinions on what should and could be used for this, and in the future I will do another care sheet to delve into the hot topic of bio-active VS naturalistic VS fantasy decor. I personally only have bio-active habitats for all my spiders, and this option has so many benefits including the most important one of being great for your spiders health, but for now I will run through the easiest and most purse-friendly option that the majority of people opt for with their first jumping spider, which is naturalistic. This basically means that the enclosure looks as close to what the spider would have in the wild with the exception of the majority of items like plants being artificial. For the floor of the enclosure and to help with humidity a little bit of substrate is still needed in the form of sphagnum moss or purpose made spider, insect and reptile soil mixtures which will retain a little moisture without becoming sodden or waterlogged and leading to moldy bits growing. Jumping spiders can be found just about anywhere in the world. With the exception of extreme polar regions. Jumping spiders generally reside in more tropical areas, but can withstand cooler climates as well depending upon the species. And have even been known to live on the slopes of Mount Everest. How cool is that? These can be fed from 6th instar onward depending on your spiders size as they’re strong little worms that can also nip your spider given the chance, so always supervise your spider when it’s hunting and eating a mealworm. These also burrow into the substrate and then turn into beetles which can be fatal to your spider if it bites it as they have really powerful mandibles and hard exoskeletons meaning your spider won’t be able to defend themselves. So if your spider doesn’t eat it within half an hour, remove it from their enclosure. This type of catching their food requires a lot of patience on the spider's part meaning they will go weeks without food while waiting for something to come their way, and it’s not very common for them to leave their burrow to go out to look for food purposely.Before we dive i nto what it takes to look after a pet jumping spider there are a few interesting things you need to know about them first. They also have 8 eyes and each pair of eyes does a different job including giving the spider nearly a 360 view, meaning even if they aren’t facing you they are still watching you!

I also want to mention that some spiders won’t ever get used to it and won’t tolerate being handled at all. I have a couple of such spiders which are “look but don't touch” and others that I can and do handle, but that’s absolutely their choice. Exactly the same as green bottles but larger and can be fed from 6th instar onward. If feeding these to sub adult/adult spiders you may need to feed a little more frequently than if feeding them locusts. Like us, jumping spiders are diurnal which means they’re awake during daylight hours and they sleep at night. This is why we advise using a bright LED lamp over their enclosure for 12 hours a day to mimic the natural light they would get from living out in the wild in their country of origin. Much like us, they require daylight to see, to help stimulate their bodies and minds to get out of bed in the morning, hunt for food, and just go about their daily spider duties. Despite them being able to jump around 50 times the distance relative to their size, when inside their captive habitats they actually don’t “jump” around it all that much and instead choose to scuttle around the walls of their enclosure. They will pounce on their prey though if need be at feeding time, and given enough room outside their enclosure they will try to jump from one thing to another if it looks within their reach. BigFATphids, I love supporting small business owners. Aside from that BigFATphids offers such high-quality products that are fun and funky for both slings and adults.

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DO NOT use the flies buzzing around your house that come through the window as these can be harmful for your spider and you don’t know what they’ve landed on and could be covered in pesticides and other toxic substances. Another thing people often get wrong is tweezer feeding their spider. Jumping spiders love to hunt, and they're amazing at it. Some will spend a little time stalking their prey first, and some will just pounce straight away, it totally depends on the spider. Allowing them to hunt as they would in the wild provides them with enrichment and stimulation. So when feeding I recommend putting the prey item into the eye line of your spider, and then leave them to do the rest on their own. The only time I do think it's OK to tweezer feed is for very young spiders that are moving onto larger prey for the first time, injured spiders that may need a little helping hand, and for very old spiders that find it very hard to hunt. Overfeeding them is often done with no ill intent of their owner, they just assume their spider is hungry every couple of days when in reality these spiders can go weeks without food. For a sub-adult/adult jumping spider 15x15x20cm is adequate, and there are many great options available from a few reptile and pet shops online, each one offering slightly varied designs which suit people based on personal choice.

It’s often easy to forget when you’ve been keeping jumping spiders for a while that some of the very basic and what a seasoned keeper would think of as obvious facts and information about them aren’t always so obvious to brand new keepers. The largest of the jumping spiders comes from the Hyllus genus and can reach up to 4cm in some cases, with the smallest species of jumping spider being as tiny as just a millimeter. Spider wax levels-up the volume and texture on all hair types. Try it on undercuts with longer hair on top - either straight and spiky, wavy and disheveled, or curly and wild. Sharpen the tips and boost the height of a fauxhawk or send spikes out in all directions. Define a wavy French crop or take a mullet-mohawk up, up, up.

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Slings should be fed fruit flies, and need to be fed more frequently than that of an older jumping spider. i4/i5 - fruit flies, i6/i8 - fly spikes, micro meal worms, micro roaches, i8+ - flies, fly spikes, meal worms, wax worms/moths & roaches.