#icius

a spider's willingness to abandon its meal and run away often seems inversely proportional to how likely they would be to run away without a meal - orbweavers and ambush predators like some crab spiders will drop their food at the slightest scare, while a lot of jumpers will, in my experience, hang onto it for as long as possible and allow you to get close for once. a breach of privacy, maybe, but i'm the one feeling watched by this Icius here

@dismalsheen​ submitted: Hi! I’m sending a bunch of cute bugs your way hehe All of them found in Italy! Now, the first two I’m pretty sure are saitis barbipes male and female, not sure about the other spiders though! Also do you have any idea what the red caterpillar might be?

They are all beautiful! I’m especially a big fan of the waving jumping spider in the first photo and the precious mantis in the last. Definitely agreed with your ID on the first two photos! The third photo looks like a jumper in the genus Icius, but the fourth I can’t tell without a better photo. The jumper in the fifth photo looks like a half-edged wall jumper.

filed under: old oc designs that I sorely need to revisit.

They’re both elemental spirits. Icius (Winter/Death) on the left, and Namar (Wind/Change) on the right. I was gonna make a whole pantheon like this but never got off the ground with it because I was like... thirteen and had nobody to talk to. ;w;’‘

it's not uncommon for a spider's prey to be basically unidentifiable, even if it's a spider that doesn't wrap its food in silk like a jumper. in this ironic case though, i know the spider's prey is a lauxaniid fly, and the only reason why i can vaguely recognize the spider itself as Icius is because i see them around here so often - the slightly awkward angle and lighting don't help. all that matters is that she's enjoying her meal though

jumpers are famously dimorphic, with sex often being easily distinguishable in a pair of individuals by simply figuring out which of the two looks more ridiculous, and Icius is no exception. in this particular situation though, you don't need to worry about markings and colors when one of the two has a dumptruck carrying the other's weight in children

after some leaf flipping and a lot of patience and slow movements i managed to convince this Icius to stop staring into space and stare at me instead. you really gotta go for the small victories with these things especially because they love hiding in trees

in these photos that i tentatively took from much further away while she was, you guessed it, still staring into space, you can also see a much bigger katydid looming in the distance like a kaiju