My name is Ant (Myrmarachne maxillosa)

My name is Ant. Give me a hug.

One of my best loved mimic spiders is the the ant mimicking jumping spider Mymarachne maxillosa.  It doesn’t have as beautiful a colour as the Wide Jawed Viciria, but it does have such an endearing expression.

Picking its teeth?

We found this individual (amongst plenty others) in between banana leaves webbed together in the park.

Getting one to stop and pose for the camera however was a really tough challenge.  We literally had the spider crawling all over us for such a long time before we could get it to stay in the web it had made and relax for a bit.

This spider mimics the ant’s scurrying movement across the leaves, waves its first pair of feet in the air like a pair of ant feelers and is also the same colour as the ant it is trying to mimic below.  What a brilliant disguise!:

Now don’t you wanna give Ant a big hug?