God and Nature 2025 #2
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By Carlos Pinkham
Look carefully at this brass sculpture of a saffron flower, and you will notice a flower crab spider the same color as the sculpture poised in the angle between the base of the two nearest petals, waiting patiently to catch any unsuspecting insect dropping in to taste the nectar and harvest the pollen.
Look carefully at this brass sculpture of a saffron flower, and you will notice a flower crab spider the same color as the sculpture poised in the angle between the base of the two nearest petals, waiting patiently to catch any unsuspecting insect dropping in to taste the nectar and harvest the pollen.
Crab spiders, or, perhaps more descriptively, flower crab spiders, are members of the family Thomisidae, which contains 175 genera and 2070 species. This one is probably a species of Misumena. Members of this family frequently sit in ambush on flowers. Some species can morph to the color of the flower they’ve chosen for their ambush site over a period of several days. If this spider is one of those that can, it would have clearly been there for a while—though, hiding in a flower made of brass, it was probably not successful even once during that time!
Crab spiders, then, are ultimate deceivers. The deceiver in this photo is not unlike another deceiver of biblical notoriety, Satan, the father of lies (John 8:44). And just like Satan, who was deceived by thinking he could thwart God’s plan by tempting Christ (Matthew 4:1-11), and when that failed, by killing Christ (Gen 3:15), only to have Him rise from the dead, this crab spider “thought” this deception would kill an unsuspecting visitor to the flower. Both deceivers were deceived!
The photo was taken at Safran Nordique, a saffron farm in Clermont, Quebec, Canada on July 9, 2023. https://www.tourisme-charlevoix.com/en/businesses/safran-nordique
More information on flower crab spiders:
Milne, Lorus and Margery, 1995, The National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders, Chanticleer Press, New York, pp 906-907.
Comstock, John Henry, 1914, The Spider Book, A Manual for the Study of the Spiders, and their Near Relatives, the Scorpions, Whip-Scorpions, Harvestmen, and Other Members of the Class Arachnida, Found in America North of Mexico, with Analytical Keys for Their Classification and Popular Accounts of Their Habits, The New Nature Library, Volume 7, Part 2, pp 525-529.
Carlos Pinkham received a PhD in evolution from University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, in 1971. He entered the Army's environmental program at its inception and retired as Colonel in 2003. In 1982 he joined the Biology Department of Norwich University, Northfield, Vermont, as a Visiting Professor, where he taught environmental biology and human anatomy and physiology. In 2009 he retired as Professor Emeritus of Biology. He is the author of The Trouble with the Trinity, A Layman-to-Layman Study of the Biblical Evidence for the Triune Nature of God. (Covenant, 2019). He is vice-president of the Affiliation of Christian Biologists.