Jumping spiders have superb vision--their lives depend on it. Jumping spiders are visual predators, stalking their prey before the final jump. Yet the neural basis of this behavior has been hard to examine. Spiders have a high internal pressure such that making a hole in the cuticle releases the pressure and proves fatal to the spider.
Gil Menda, a postdoctoral student in Ron Hoy's lab, managed to solve this problem, and now Gil and his colleagues have begun to investigate the physiology of the spider's visual system.