Ant-mimic Spider

This was a wonderful surprise to me in the field. I had assumed that ant-mimic spiders only occur in the tropics, but there are indeed temperate species. I was sitting down watching the underside of a leaf of a Catalpa tree and noticed this spider, which I thought was just an ant. It didn't run away to a different part of the leaf like all the other ants I saw that day did, however, so I became suspicious. It was small, so I couldn't really pick out any details, but it looked different enough from other ants that I decided to capture it and look at it more closely later. Sure enough, I looked at it under a hand lens and a microscope and it had four pairs of legs (then it spun so web, so that definitely ruled out an ant). This is a marvelous spider, I can't do it justice with words (or even my picture), it's just that good a mimic of an ant. Simply extraordinary. So the lessons learned from this capture were: 1. pay attention to the little things and 2. learn some animal behavior!