Takeoff kinematics in Amazonian jumping spiders

Jumping is a demanding mode of locomotion. Successful jumping enables navigation of complex terrain but requires high force generation, precise timing and spatial decision making. Salticids (jumping spiders) are agile and dexterous jumpers. They use jumping as a primary means of locomotion and acrobatic prey capture and predator evasion across many substrates. Here, we analyze high-speed videos of individual spiders representing 15 genera of Amazonian jumping spiders with varied morphologies to understand how spider morphology influences jump takeoff kinematics. We combine high-quality key-point tracking with novel graph based modal representation that respect the underlying spider body plan. These representations enable us to quantify dynamical similarities and differences across these diverse spiders. Our results hint at conserved jumping strategies across a wide range of evolutionary distance and morphology. More generally, the computational framework introduces allows us to probe both the universal and unique features of jumps across Amazonian jumping spiders and other limbed jumpers.