Gotta love that spider!
If you don't like spiders, you should like this one: the green lynx spider, Peucetia viridans.
It's bright green, the kind that makes you think of shamrocks and leprechauns and Ireland.
Its name, viridans, is Latin for "becoming green" but wait, it's already green, or it was when we spotted it in Vacaville on a pink rockrose, Cistus x purpureus (plant identified by Ellen Zagory of the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden).
Soon the spider may change colors.
"Late in the season Peucetia viridans is prone to change its color from predominantly green to paler yellow, typically with streaks of reddish, suggesting degradation of the tetrapyrrole pigment in the blood," according to Wikipedia. "Gravid females may change their color to fit their background. This takes about 16 days."
The eggs? They're a vivid orange. "The female constructs one to five 2-centimeter (0.8 in) egg sacs in September and October, each containing 25 to 600 bright orange eggs, which she guards, usually hanging upside down from a sac and attacking everything that comes near," Wikipedia tells us. "Remarkably, one of her means of defense is to squirt venom from her chelicerae, sometimes for a distance of about a foot (300 mm).The eggs hatch after about two weeks, and after another two weeks fully functional spiderlings emerge from the sac. They pass through eight instars to reach maturity."
Common in Jamaica, the green lynx spider is often found in the southern United States and parts of Northern California (as well as Mexico, Central America West Indies and Venezuela).
If this venomous spider bites you, it might be painful, but it won't kill you.
The good news is this: it's a predator and it's mostly beneficial. Cotton farmers love the green lynx spider and value it as part of their agricultural pest management. These spiders hunt several moth species and their larvae, including such pests as bollworm moth (Heliothis zea), the cotton leafworm moth (Alabama agrillacea), and the cabbage looper moth (Trichoplusia ni), according to Wikipedia. In your garden, it might help "protect" your cabbage and corn, as well, by attacking and devouring the insect pests that attack your crops.
Well, yes, they do prey on such beneficial insects as honey bees. That comes with the territory.
This one, however, looked at us, and only when we shadowed it with our cell phone, did it scurry beneath the blossom.
Check out the UC Statewide Integrated Pest Management Program's entry on common garden spiders.