Hey, friends. This is Ellen Weatherford. I am here once again with Just the Zoo of Us. This is your favorite animal review podcast. And this week, we're talking about jumping spiders with our brand new friend. This is Dr. Sebastian Etcheveri. Say hi.

Hi, everybody. And hey, Ellen. Thank you so much for having me.

Of course.

Thank you for being here.

I'm really excited to virtually meet you because I've been following you on Twitter for a long time.

We have some awesome stuff, including content about spiders.

So introduce yourself a little bit to us and tell us like how you got into working with spiders.

Absolutely. So I'm a spider scientist. I just finished doing my PhD on actually the courtship

dances of jumping spiders and how they get their audience's attention. But I didn't really,

I wasn't always into spiders. I grew up in New York City, so I'm like the city of Spider-Man,

but that was like basically my connection to spiders, if that, growing up. And it wasn't until I was

applying to graduate school where in the middle of an interview with a professor, they're just like,

oh, by the way, this is a project that I've just like, you know, I've been working on, haven't really been, you know, it's just starting now. And for the first time, they showed me a video, a, like, close up macro video of a jumping spider dancing. And I had seen jumping spider before, just as these tiny little specks, you know, hopping around. They were like, oh, yeah, that's cute.

I wasn't particularly scared of them, but I was like, you know, didn't know too much about them. And I see this thing. I mean, they had, their eyes are massive. They are doing this huge, like, coordinated song and dance show, super colorful, super agile. and in the meeting I stood up up and was like, okay, I need to know more about

these animals. Because it was like, it was one of those moments where it's like, your mind just goes

like, what? They can do that? That's what they look like up close? I had no idea. You know,

I didn't know about their, like, how their eyes work, how they have so many different eyes that

all work together. And then from then, I they have so many different eyes that all work together.

And then from then I just, so I ended up, started to work on jumping spiders, and then from there, then I was like, oh, well, jumping spiders are cool.

What about other spiders? And I started learning about the huge diversity of spiders. And each new one I meet, I'm just like blown away because each new one has

like its own little superpower, its own way of being a spider. That is so much fun.

I love jumping spiders. I feel like they're a good like intro spider. They are. Yeah, for a lot of

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