An old friend, a little specimen and a new lesson

While browsing through the gardens recently, I came across my Speedwell growing over into one of the garden paths. As I had to walk around it, a yellow spot on the otherwise blue flower spike caught my eye. Upon closer look, I realized it was my old friend, the Red-spotted Crab Spider, Misumena vatia. If you look closely you can see her on the middle spike.




I had seen her last week, with one of my gardener friends, as she was hanging onto a leaf blade of a daylily, not too far from her original Liatris roost in spring, on the other side of the path. Here is the spring photo, and here it the one from this week. She has maintained her bright yellow coloring on both plants. What was remarkable about seeing her at this point is that I had just recently come across a baby Red Spider Crab on a Milkweed that I was taking out of another area.




This little babe did not make it, but remained attached to a Milkweed leaf.




I scooped up the leaf and took it in to add this little critter to my insect collection.


This little creature is so very tiny, just an eight of an inch across. The adult
(Okay, so I had to go to my book to look up the specifics of the size of the adult, and found out something very interesting. The female gets to be 3/8", while the male is only 1/8". So the question becomes, is this a baby spider or a male? So now I need to go look at it more closely. Okay, where did I leave the wilted milkweed leaf with the spider on it?? Have no clue, so need to go look. Whew!! Found it fairly quickly, under a pile of paperwork that I need to get to some one of these days!! So the female is yellowish to white with crimson streaks on each side of the abdomen adn a reddishbrown stain between eyes. Yea, like I could get a close look at the eyes on this 1/8" specimen! The male, on the other hand has a dark reddish brown cephalothorax (Okay, now to look that up) the cephalothorax is the section consisting of the head and thorax just above the abdomen, in case anyone was wondering. So there is a white spot in the center of the cephalothorax and in front of the eyes. The male has 2 pairs of yellow hind legas and 2 pairs of reddish-brown fore legs. How nice for him!! LOL!!

So is this a male? I need to get a magnifying glass out to see if I can figure it out. Based on the 2 pairs of front legs being brownish, I am guessing that this was a male. The abdomen is large enough to see, but the cephalothorax is just too small to see clearly. Okay, so now I know how to tell a male from a female in the Red-spotted Crab Spider family. Now there is a lesson learned. And one which I probably would not have mourned had I not know all this.