What a generous gift to those little flies! This is Sarracenia flava (yellow pitcher plant), a carnivorous native of the US Southeast Plains in a band from coastal Alabama out to southeastern Virginia. The weird looking things on the left side of the 2nd picture are the old structures for the flowers it previously had before the pitchers fully developed and opened up. (The flowers in question look like this and smell bad.) I’m not terribly sure of what the purple thing is since this is my first time keeping one, maybe that’s what develops into a seed pod? Anyway, seems to be a popular place to chill among the arthropods.
edit: initially botched the photos, maybe this works
I wonder if the pretty green spider is future luncher, or lunchee.
Nice writeup and photos!
I would see the crab spider lurking in wait for about a solid month or so, so I think surely it must have been munching on something. But it’s been gone for a while now. It wasn’t the only spider either, some very tiny spiders are even bolder and set up spiderwebs inside the pitcher!
I think both are high risk strategies though, the pitchers sway around a lot when it gets windy here and if you loose your footing and tumble while you’re inside the tube of danger you’ll meet a grim end. Usually the spider would be on kind of like the back or the side of the lid but sometimes it was in the interior and you’d only need to slip up once…
Ah, crab spider. Thanks for that.
Doing a quick lookup, it sounds like even small rodents fall in sometimes! (maybe not this sp., but some other Pitchers, I believe)