It’s winter, and I now live in a place where it actually gets rather cold at night. That unfortunately means that I don’t have my usual access to mid-winter insects and I can no longer make you all jealous that we still have bugs out and about. But, I do have a nice stockpile of shots I took at BugShot 2012 that I haven’t shared yet! While I anxiously await spring and the return of pretty flowers and insects to photograph, I bring you bugs and other arthropods from Florida!
Every time I look through my BugShot photos, I see new creatures I didn’t realize I’d photographed. For example, I took this photo thinking I was photographing a group of flowers. Somehow, I completely missed the giant yellow crab spider:
Crab spider on flowers
It was dark out, but wow! For such a big spider, it sure did blend in well!
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The Dragonfly Woman 
I had to blow it up and really examine the picture before I realized there were spider legs. Without that, I still wouldn’t have found that spider!
Right? I was standing a few inches away from that spider and I didn’t even see it. As I said, this was supposed to be a flower shot and I only noticed the spider after looking at this photo a dozen or more times!
It was only because you said it was there that I kept looking until I realized that the stamens had joints and hinges and ick! were actually spider legs.
I was staring right at it and had to figure out where it was in the photo!
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Crazy huh?
I don’t leave links to my WW posts because I don’t make a truly wordless post. You’ll notice I call mine Well-Nigh Wordless Wednesday posts – I always include about 100-150 words of text! I don’t want to have people show up at my blog expecting to find a true WW post, so I don’t leave links.
I don’t know why you call that spider a crab. Just because he didn’t stand out and wave to you is no reason to call him rude! : – )
Ha ha! But I have no idea what this spider’s personality was like. He might have been a crab! I didn’t notice him there when I took the photo so I didn’t have an opportunity to ask.
You’ve just got to look for them dragonflywoman. Even here is frozen Alberta we have no problem finding dozens of active arthropods species in mid-winter. The Second Annual Winter Challenge is on – beat the Birders (who log about 140 species of birds in December and January) – and we are already up to about 60 species – and haven’t had to go to the Subnivean fauna yet.
I know. I’ve seen several live insects here in the last few days! They just aren’t as numerous or as obvious as they were in the Arizona desert.