Zebra Jumping Spider Facts & Information

What You Can Do

Preventing infestation begins with:

• Limiting food sources: Make sure the pest's food sources are kept to a minimum.

• Exclusion: Holes, cracks, and gaps need to be properly sealed to prevent entry.

• Cleaning: Removing ground litter that serves as harborage for spiders is also helpful.

What Orkin Does

Your local Orkin Pro is trained to help manage zebra jumping spiders and similar pests. Since every building or home is different, your Orkin Pro will design a unique spider treatment program for your situation.

Orkin can provide the right solution to keep zebra jumping spiders in their place…out of your home, or business.

Appearance

• Abdomen: The abdomen has white or light-colored hairs arranged in opposing stripes with a solid band of white around the front part of the abdomen.

• Body: The cephalothorax (united head and thorax) on the zebra jumping spider has a white lateral band of hairs with additional white hairs and lustrous scales that appear near the region of their eyes.

• Eyes: As with other species of jumping spiders, they have eight eyes with the center two eyes appearing large and prominent, thus providing the jumping spider group with possibly the best vision of any other group of arthropods.

• Size: Females and males are similar in size, ranging from about 1/8 to 1/4 inch long.

• Characteristics: Females are often lighter in color than the males. Males have very large, dark fangs that project forward, unlike most other spider species whose fangs extend down.

Diet

Zebra jumping spiders are hunting spiders that do not spin a web to catch prey. Instead, they use their web to protect the egg sacs at their nighttime hiding sites. Their prey is any insect or other spider that the Zebra jumping spider can overpower.

Hunting Behaviors

They have an interesting behavior of capturing prey by using a strand of silk like a bungee cord that is attached to the surface on which they are hunting – the side of a house, for example. The spider attaches the "bungee cord" to the vertical wall, then leaps onto its prey and traps it so its meal cannot escape.

Geographic Range

Zebra jumping spiders were previously brought to the United States from Europe and Asia and now its normal range is southern Canada and the entire United States, though it doesn't appear to be common in the Rocky Mountain states.

Habitat

These spiders commonly inhabit gardens and may accidentally be brought indoors where they like to live on doorways, walls, and windows. This species is usually found around urban and suburban areas where it is often seen hunting on the walls of buildings where the sun warms the surface. Zebra jumping spiders are especially frequent in or around:

• Bushes

• Fences

• High grass

• Inside and on the exterior of buildings

• Rock walls

• Under stones

Reproduction

These spiders usually mate during the late spring or early summer, and in a few weeks, the female spiders lay egg sacs in the protective web. Egg sacs contain from 15-25 eggs. After about 3-4 weeks, the eggs hatch and the young spiders emerge from the egg sac and leave to begin life on their own.