She must have dropped on my head somewhere between the overgrown orchard and old electricity post, an artifact of a village so picturesque it now exists only in name. A sharp gust may have swept her off a leaf, a predator forced a leap, or she could have succumbed to a lust for wander and set herself loose on a strand of silk. Through luck or leggy manœuvres, she evaded an evening crush and emerged on a sweaty palm that set her down on a low ridge of mossy rocks, where she ran briefly amuck before assuming a pose of open arms.
The long forelegs, of little use for walking and bearing stiff spines on their distal segments, serve as snares, helping the pale green thomisid grasp and secure flies, bees or tender wasps that land within range or on the other side of her blade. A sharp bite silences struggling prey and a dose of digestive enzymes turns discrete organs into a primordial soup in a chitinous can. Lacking farsight, she probably relies on other, more tactile, senses to tell if an approaching mass is a likely meal or a would-be lover. Unlike their minuscule cousins who lurk on flowers, male crab spiders in the genus Oxytate (=Dieta) attain sizes that their mates can scarcely ignore, making it paramount for suitors to defuse hale appetites with a wave of good vibes. Courtship in high places is thus an affair fraught with risk, a venture of high hopes and low returns save a chance to hold hands, match haploids and close the accounts receivable of a genetic loop.
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