Female flower spiders (Misumena vatia) can change color over the course of several weeks in order to more effectively blend in with the flowers it’s hunting on. It’s not quite like a chameleon, though. The base color is that bright white, and it can produce yellow pigment to turn the bright yellow color, but that’s about it.
These bastards are actually less cryptic than they could be, because insects see differently than we (and the spiders) do. Some pollinators/potential prey pick up on their presence and don’t really care because they’re big enough to take their chances. Others have gotten wise to their tricks and will avoid their flowers in addition to warning other bees about the possibility of hiding spiders. Still others have no fucking clue what they’re doing, and prefer spidered-up flowers to other flowers because the spiders make the flower more conspicuous in the UV spectrum.
So the whole changing colors thing could be a basic gesture towards hiding from prey and primarily focused on keeping the spiders from getting eaten in turn by birds, who would be more likely to be fooled by a strict color-matching thing. The spiders’ color change is prompted by visual feedback. How do we know this? Because science is willing to do things like carefully blind spiders and then compare them to the unblinded control group.
Things science is also willing to do: Pipe a “Fuck you, we’re bees” symphony into birds’ nest boxes to make sure birds are being driven out by warning displays instead of stings. Oh, and stage lots and lots of spider bro-fights to catalog the progression.
Flower spiders aren’t the only ones to change color, either. Green lynx spiders (Peucetia viridans) do the same thing, and also spit venom at you if you annoy them.
chequerootlurks
