Spiders at the gates

I guess it's been maybe three summers ago now that I ventured out into the front yard with my new digital camera and decided to see what interesting things I could find. I had been exploring the macro feature so I'd been taking pictures of bees and crickets and having a pretty good time, and then I went over to my white rose bush (Pope John Paul II, big blossoms and wonderful fragrance, if you're a rose lover) and saw something I'd never seen before:

My reaction was something like "WTF!!??". There it was, staring at me, looking like it was going to pounce and rip my face off at any second. I'm not ashamed to admit it, spiders freak me the hell out. They can be fascinating from a distance, but they'd better not even THINK about trying to touch me. Ew ew ew ew ew ew.

Anyway, I'd never seen a spider like this before. Pretty much anyone who lives in the NW, or I guess anywhere besides the Sahara or Antarctica, is used to spiders. You know, like those giant black ones that like to park on the ceiling right over your bed? Or maybe they just do that to me. Either way, I really do NOT appreciate it. That's just sadistic.

But I digress........so, this was something I'd never seen before so I got online and found out that it's a Crab spider. This is a large family of related spiders that use ambush hunting instead of webs to catch their prey. Apparently my yard is home to the genus Misumena, commonly known as flower crab spiders. This site has some great info and pics: http://bugguide.net/node/view/1957/bgpage

So I spent day after day running out to the yard during that summer looking for more of these amazing little beasts and suddenly I was seeing them everywhere! I got this next shot one day when the current resident of my white rosebush had just caught a bee and was having a grand time sucking the juice out of that poor thing. Spent a good hour on it, then callously tossed it to the ground. Oh, cruel spider, how cold is your heart......

Since my yard has flowers in abundance, I started finding crab spiders just about everywhere I looked, and this genus has the ability to alter, to some degree, the color of its body to match the flower it's sitting on. Like this little guy lurking on a sunflower:

And this one on the brick-red rosebush in the back (Hot chocolate is the name. Very hardy and disease-resistant):

Apparently the overall body colors of the kind of spider I have are limited to white, yellow, and pale green, but you can see that this one has stripes on its legs and body that match the flower color. Here's the same spider a few days later. Om nom nom nom:

I even found a baby practicing its technique in the spikes of an echinacea:

One of these days, if you happen to have a good camera, go out in your yard, or to a park, or a public garden. It's amazing what you'll find when you stop and look. There's a whole little world out there, going about its business under our feet, all around us. Explore it, enjoy it, get lost in it. :)