How they see
How does a jumping spider see the world?
Tiny eyes — sharpest of their size
The tiny jumping spider punches astonishingly above its weight in eyesight. Of its eight eyes, the two big forward-facing ones deliver the sharpest vision known for an animal its size, sensitive to ultraviolet and green, while the smaller side eyes sweep for movement. It is a visual hunter that stalks and pounces like a cat rather than trapping prey in a web.
See through their eyes
Human ≈ 60 cpd (20/10)
How sharp is a jumping spider's vision?
Its eyes resolve about 6 cycles per degree (20/100 (est.)), while a human reaches around 60 cpd (20/10). Its field of view spans about 320°.
How does a jumping spider see a human?
Its eyes resolve about 6 cycles per degree against your 60, so a face has to be roughly 10 times closer for it to pick out the detail you do. Your outline and your movement read clearly; your expression does not.
Colour comparison
How each colour shifts when seen through this animal's eyes, using the same colour model as the app. Tones a screen can't emit (such as ultraviolet) are shown as an approximation.
What colours can a jumping spider see?
UV–green colour, extended to red in some species by a retinal filter. Remarkably sharp for such tiny eyes.
Photoreceptors
Principal eyes: UV + green cones (some with a red filter); 4 eye pairs
Cone peak sensitivities
- UV360 nm
- Green530 nm
How does a jumping spider see in the dark?
Day-active hunters.
How does a jumping spider's vision compare to a human's?
In absolute terms a jumping spider's detail, around 20/100, sits well below your 20/20, though it is remarkable for such a minute eye. It sees ultraviolet you cannot, across eight eyes that cover far more of its surroundings than your two.
What is special about a jumping spider's vision?
- Highest acuity for its size of any animal
- Telephoto principal eyes with a moving retina
- Eight eyes for near-360° awareness
What the research shows
The anatomy behind the jumping spider's sharp sight was described by Land (1969), who studied the structure of the principal eyes in salticids: each ends in a tiered, boomerang-shaped retina that muscles move to scan a scene, resolving detail on the order of 10 arc-minutes within a very small field. Colour evidence came much later. Zurek et al. (2015) showed that in the genus Habronattus the principal-eye photoreceptors are sensitive to ultraviolet near 360 nm and green near 520–530 nm, and that a long-pass red filter covering part of the central retina shifts the effective peak of some green receptors to about 626 nm. That creates trichromacy only in a small central patch; elsewhere the spider is an ultraviolet–green dichromat.
The red channel is a Habronattus finding and should not be generalized to every jumping spider. Reducing a narrow, scanned high-resolution field to one acuity number is also an approximation: the page's 6 cpd is an estimated equivalent, not a behavioural grating threshold. A screen presents one uniform image, so it cannot convey the contrast between a tiny, sharp, moving central field and the low-resolution secondary eyes that watch for motion around the body, and it cannot display ultraviolet at all.
Guides: Animals that see ultraviolet · Which animal has the best eyesight? · All guides
Scientific sources
- Land (1969)
- Zurek et al. (2015)
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