Pest Library

Characteristics

The goldenrod crab spider is just like a small crab since all of its three pairs of legs are extended out from the side. It belongs to the spider crab family; it has two front legs that are longer than the rest, while their body is wide, short, and flat.

The female spider is found to have either yellow, white, or pale green with a red mark on her abdomen, depending on her environment, and is up to 3/8 inch in length. The male spider has a darker pattern of reddish brown, and is just 1/8 inch in length.

Habitat

This spider likes to stay in fields, gardens and orchards, and prefer hiding in flowers, herbs, and shrubs of all sorts. However, they prefer to stay in gardens where yellow and white flowers are seen and mostly stay on goldenrod flowers, daisies, and milkweeds.

Behavior

The goldenrod crab spider is a chameleon that has the ability to blend well with its environment so that it can capture its prey. Their ability to change color from white to yellow allows them to blend well among the flowers. Although they do not create webs to capture their prey, they are versatile since they can walk in any direction, such as walking forwards, backwards, and sideways.

Food

These goldenrod crab spiders prey on different pollinators; they attack while they wait and hide on flowers. Once a butterfly, a bee, or a fly visits a flower for its nectar, the goldenrod spider, who may already be camouflaging on the flower, will ambush the insect by grabbing it with the use of her front legs and then bite the prey with the use of her small jaws that contains the venom. She consumes its prey by sucking all the body fluid out of it, then leave it as a waste.

Life Cycle

The goldenrod crab spider has a short life cycle of one year. The adult male will find as many females to mate as possible, then die shortly. Female spiders, oftentimes, die before her eggs are hatched.

For a male spider to locate a female spider, he will follow the threads of females by ballooning. Once he finds a female to court, he will loosely wrap himself to the female and start mating.

For the female to support egg development, she will need to gain as much weight as she can. After eating a lot and mating, she will release her eggs on a Milkweed (their preferred nesting site). She will wrap it in a folded leaf and web it together so she can lay her eggs inside it. The mother crab spider will spend her remaining days protecting her eggs until she dies at the start of winter. Once the eggs hatched, the spiderlings are now on their own and their life cycle starts again.

Other Information and Tips

Although their venom is strong and can easily kill prey twice their size, they are not considered dangerous to humans. In fact, this spider is widely studied by most scientists and researchers for its ability to change color, their vision, and how they capture their prey. Most are even amazed to watch these spiders and photograph them during the summer while they sit and wait for their pollinators to come.

Photo: I'm clean! by Mario Quevedo, used under CC BY 2.0 / resized from original