Here is the last dispatch from the field, this time from North Padre Island near Corpus Christi, TX. It covers the last part of our collecting trip taking us from Del Rio, TX along the Rio Grande and up the Gulf Coast. Thanks again to everyone who contributed to our crowdfunding campaign! https://experiment.com/projects/why-are-some-jumping-spiders-so-colorful

Our new paper just came out in Animal Behavior, link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2015.05.007. It's a review of the reproducibility of contemporary studies of biological coloration. We found that methodological details are often missing, and data are seldom publicly available. We present guidelines for methods reporting, and for improving reproducibility.

I'm currently hunting for Habronattus jumping spiders in the American Southwest. This month-long field trip has largely been funded by the public, via the crowdfunding website experiment.com. To keep backers in the loop about our field work, I produced a series of video dispatches as we travelled from Arizona to Texas. Here are the first four, more are coming as we're wrapping up.