White-banded crab spider

The whitebanded crab spider gets its name from a pale ridge just above the mouth, visible on close inspection. Females have a body that is pale in the center and darker, often greenish, at the sides, typically white, yellow or pink with dark patterned marks on the abdomen, while the much smaller males have a green, brown, yellow or orange body with long, dark front legs.

This crab spider sits motionless on flowers such as black-eyed Susan or goldenrod, grabbing bees, flies and other visiting insects with its front legs rather than trapping them in a web. Found in fields and field edges across most of the United States and southern Canada, adults are active from summer into September, and females can slowly shift their color between white and yellow to better match the bloom they are hunting from.