What is that Strange
Flower Crab Spider?

We know this much. The creature in the photo below belongs to the family Thomisidae, which means the animal is a type of crab spider.

Beyond that, when I first photographed it, almost everything about its identity was a mystery.

When I first saw the spider, I immediately thought of a documentary by David Attenborough. In it he described extraordinary spiders that mimic flowers—sometimes so perfectly that pollinating insects land directly on the spider itself.

Looking at this strange creature perched on the leaf, I remember thinking that it resembled a piece of an orchid. For years I referred to it simply as the white orchid spider.

But what was it really?

At the time—this was around 2007—identifying obscure tropical arthropods was not easy. There were far fewer online databases, and the global network of amateur naturalists that now exists on platforms like iNaturalist simply did not exist yet.

So the investigation began the old-fashioned way: by emailing experts and comparing scattered photographs across the internet.

Here is what I uncovered during those first attempts.

1. Flower crab spiders do not build webs. Instead they rely on ambush. They sit motionless on vegetation and capture insects that come within reach.

2. Many species in the family Thomisidae have evolved to resemble parts of flowers—petals, stamens, or pollen clusters. These are often called flower spiders, or sometimes orchid-mimic spiders.

3. Eventually I found a photograph online of something that looked very similar. The photographer also referred to it as an orchid-mimicking crab spider.

But the details did not quite line up.

The photo I found had been taken in the Amazon basin, while my spider had been photographed at higher elevation in Panama. If they were the same species, that would imply a broad distribution. Yet the photographer believed he might be the first person ever to photograph the species.

The mystery deepened.

Eventually I received a response from the Department of Entomology at the University of California Riverside. They located an image of a similar spider photographed in Brazil and suggested a possible identification:

Epicadus heterogaster.

That sounded promising, but the experts were cautious. In fact, their reply included an important warning:

The taxonomy of the genus is such that there are only six species, and it looks like only one of them is recorded outside of Brazil — Epicadus granulatus. However, using geographic distribution to make a species ID is NOT wise. There is no reason that E. heterogaster could NOT be found in Panama, nor any of the remaining species (or, for that matter, it could also be undescribed).

Their final advice was simple:

Labelling the photo "Epicadus sp." would be as far as you could go.

And so that is where the mystery sat.

For years.

Twenty years later, natural history has changed dramatically.

Today there are global communities of naturalists sharing observations in real time. Platforms like iNaturalist allow photographs to be compared instantly against thousands of verified records, and specialists around the world can weigh in on identifications within hours.

So recently, out of curiosity, I returned to the old photograph.

Within a short time, a consensus began to emerge.

The spider matches a species now widely recognized across the Neotropics:

Epicadus septemspinosus — the Seven-spined Crab Spider.

Looking back at the photograph, the clues are obvious. The spider's abdomen bears a set of strange projections—little white spines—that resemble the reproductive structures of a flower. These bizarre appendages are not decorative. They are camouflage. The spider is effectively posing as part of a blossom while it waits for insects to land nearby.

In other words, my original instinct—that it resembled a piece of an orchid—was not far off.

What I photographed in Panama that day was not a flower at all, but a predator pretending to be one.

And after nearly twenty years of wondering, the mystery finally has a name.

Epicadus septemspinosus.

The strange genus Epicadus

The genus Epicadus contains some of the most bizarrely shaped crab spiders in the world. Instead of the smooth rounded abdomen seen in many Thomisidae, species in this group grow elaborate spines and lobes that mimic floral anatomy.

In some species the projections resemble stamens. In others they look like unopened petals. The spider becomes a piece of botanical architecture—something that pollinators ignore until it is too late.

Unlike web-building spiders, these hunters rely entirely on stealth and patience. They sit motionless on leaves or flowers with their front legs extended sideways, ready to snap shut on bees, flies, or butterflies that wander too close.

Their success depends on deception.

Which is why the spider in the photograph looks so uncanny. Your brain keeps trying to interpret it as something else—a piece of a flower, a pollen cluster, maybe even a fungal growth.

That confusion is exactly the point.

A lesson in natural history

One of the pleasures of natural history is that identifications are rarely final. Names change, taxonomy evolves, and photographs that once seemed impossible to identify sometimes yield their secrets years later.

This spider sat in my archive for nearly two decades before the tools existed to identify it confidently.

Which makes me wonder how many other photographs are waiting patiently in old hard drives—species that still have not revealed their names.

The natural world has always been mysterious.

We just have better ways of asking questions now.