Thank God for BugGuide.net and its family of fine, fine invertebrate identifiers who are all, incidentally, unpaid volunteers—and amateurs in the the truest sense of the word. I go to the site often for guidance, and highly recommend them, and so it was that when I spotted what I knew to be a Crab Spider on a Hydrangea flower, I thought I'd try to do more than simply identify it as a member of the spider family Thomisidae. After all, what else did I have to do? Spiders, of course, can be a real challenge, and, as it happened, the one photo I had of the mystery beast turned out to have been taken at the wrong angle: for crab spiders, you really need to study the orientation and placement of the eight eyes. But after looking through a large number of Thomisidae pictures, I started to notice some other patterns that proved helpful, and the body color and overall hairiness pointed me in the direction of the genus Mecaphesa. Some deeper digging got me to the likely species, which would appear to be Mecaphesa asperata, the Northern Crab Spider. Given our locale, this ID would be entirely appropriate, but maybe calling it the Disappearing Crab Spider would be an equally good common name.