Welcome to Jumping Spiders of Africa
Kindly add your Salticidae observations to the project, especially if they are tightly cropped, clear images that show some detail. An estimate of body length is always useful, if available. Notes on the substrate and habitat are helpful too.
Don't worry about the ID too much.
We'll deal with that on an ongoing basis. New species of jumping spiders are found at an impressive rate, and photographs are now often included in scholarly articles.
The classification schemes for Salticidae are a bit confusing at the moment. Hence, using subfamilies and tribes are presently not helpful in the iNat context. We'll try to establish a genus and if lucky, the species. If you are interested in the debate, check out the two schemes that are on the table in 2018. Both papers contain many photographs of live specimens:
Prószyński, J. 2017. Pragmatic Classification of The World's Salticidae (Araneae).
Free PDF 20MB: https://biotaxa.org/em/article/download/33084/29352
Maddison W.P. 2015. A phylogenetic classification of jumping spiders (Araneae: Salticidae)
Free PDF 13MB: http://www.americanarachnology.org/JoA_free/JoA_v43_n3/arac-43-03-231.pdf
It is often said that identifying spiders by photographs is difficult and unreliable. That might be so but we can make a small contribution to citizen science here by trying to bridge the gap, where possible, between scientific records and photographs of live specimens.
Comments
I have renamed the project Jumping Spiders of Africa due to popular demand :-)
It started as Jumping Spiders of southern Africa.
Yeah, happy to see this geographic expansion! I'm sure it'll become a very successful project.
By the way: you can set an observation rule "must be in taxon Salticidae". This prevents accidental additions of less bouncy organisms, and also helps project members to add observations not yet part of the project.
Have you tried migrating this to a collections project?
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