A few weeks ago, while I was on a trip to Arizona, I took a walk in the desert. (I did not make much progress as far as walking was concerned, though.) There were many flowers blooming along the sides of the trail, so I zigzagged from one flower to the next, checking for crab spiders or any other visitors (but really hoping for crab spiders).
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| Brittlebush (Encelia farinosa) flowers and one of the several crab spiders that I found. |
It was not long before my diligence was rewarded by my discovery of a very small crab spider. After that, I checked each flower even more intensely and in the end found several small crab spiders, some with even smaller prey.
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| A juvenile crap spider (Mecaphesa sp.) eating what looks like a thrips. |
For example, the spider above is eating a tiny insect that appears to be a thrips. Meanwhile, the remains of another crab spider's meal can be seen in the bottom left corner of the picture below (it is probably a tiny fly or bee).
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| This crab spider had already finished its meal (if you look closely, you can see what was left of it). |
In my search for the spiders, I also encountered quite a few other visitors to the flowers, including another successful predator. This predator was a lacewing larva that I caught in the act of living up to its name 'aphid lion'.
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| A lacewing larva, a.k.a. an aphid lion, with a captured aphid. |
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