Spectacular Crab Spider

Description:

Thomisidae; Thomisus; Thomisus spectabilis Doleschall, 1859. I am not at all sure of my ground with this spider. In fact, it would be more truthful to say that I am in a state of confusion and not secure in its identification. Here is what brought me to this point. I have taken a few photos of Thomisidae in recent years (I think I have only published one or two in PN so far) and, like everyone else, I feel that I can identify a member of the Thomisidae as soon as I see it. Identifying the genus and species is not so easy and requires some research. I started with inaturalist.org and pretty quickly saw several images that look just like mine, all identified as T. spectabilis. So that was a start. Then I noticed that there were white Crab Spiders on the same website, also called T. spectabilis. Now I just needed to sort this out and I'd be OK. My spider has large pedipalps so it is likely to be male, could the white one be a female. So I turned to Wikipedia. There, I saw that Wiki had T. spectabilis, a white one just like many images in inaturalist (and gave the common name as the White Crab Spider). But here is where it gets really tricky. Wiki mentions that the male is smaller than the female "female is up to 10 mm, the male 6.2 mm." , but no mention of the colour of the male and no picture. Now, I know (from Wiki) that the male is a little more than half the size of the female. So, back to inaturalist.org to have another look. Then I see a picture which I assume is a male on the back of a female - https://www.inaturalist.org/observations.... The male looks like mine and the female looks like the picture in Wikipedia. Problem solved ? Maybe, but not yet sure. The picture I just mentioned in inaturalist.org shows the male (if that is what it is) to be about one tenth the size of the female. That does not give me a problem in general, it just gives me a problem with the sizes in Wikipedia. e.g. I know that in many spider genera, the male can be miniscule in comparison to the female, I think Argiope spiders demonstrate this very well. So, what to do now. Well, I decided as you can see, to go with my spider being a male Thomisus spectabilis. The worst that can happen is that I could be corrected by another PN member (or Ranger) who knows his spiders better than me. That seems to be my best way out. I not only don't mind being corrected, I love it. How else can we learn.

Habitat:

This small crab spider was spotted climbing on large tangle of Tropical Whiteweed (Ageratum conyzoides) on a strip of land between rice fields. I have spotted many different species on this particular plant, to the extent that I have this jotted down in my notes as a "hot spot" for insects and spiders.