The crab spider is an ambush hunter. It often waits on flowers to catch visiting bees, flies, butterflies, and other insects. Often the crab spider's color uncannily matches the host flower. But this spider has chosen a "mix and match" option. Perhaps its brilliant yellow may appear to a hungry insect as a great mass of pollen at the flower's center.

And what of the insects the crab spiders catch? Some of them arrive to drink nectar, eat pollen, and, in the process, pollinate the flower for the next roll-of-the-dice of reproduction and evolution. Some of those insects arrive to prey on other insects, or to eat (and destroy) flower parts, or to lay eggs of maggots or caterpillars or grubs that will devour seeds. In a healthy prairie, a lot of the participants eat each other.

The flower shown here is rough blazing star — sometimes found growing by the thousands in moderately dry prairies. Notice that the top of its stem was bitten off (by a deer?), and yet what's left glows with health. A little challenge, like some moderate deer browsing, isn't going to deter a blazing star from thriving as a spectacular stage for the richness of prairie life.

Dennis Manning took this photo at about six in the morning, just before sun-up. That's a treasured time for photographers, because the light tends to be so rich, and because animals large and small are ending their nights or beginning their mornings, and often doing something interesting.

In this case, Dennis was photographing the metallic green native bees in Belmont Prairie. The bees were flying back and forth from the blazing stars to a wooden stump — where they'd disappear into the neat holes they had drilled as chambers for their eggs and babies (larvae, technically). They provision those holes with big delicious balls of nectar and pollen — for the kids. As the light brightened and the day warmed, the crab spider suddenly appeared on top of the flower — out of nowhere. Dennis thinks it must have been hiding behind and underneath the flower. Now was the time for the spider to go to work, hunting bugs to feed its own young. This is not a peaceable kingdom, but it's an inspiring model of richness, beauty, and balance.