(Epeira trivittata, Keys.)
Hidden behind these eight four-jointed legs of varying lengths, covered with hollow, sensitive bristles, is the spider’s head, with eight eyes, strong jaws, poison fangs, and a pair of palpi, which look like extremely short legs and seem to serve as hands. The hairy body is filled with thousands of eggs and contains also a marvelous reservoir of liquid rope opening into spinnerets on the under side of the body. Some of the tubes or spinnerets make strong and dry filaments and others make sticky ones. The radiating threads of the spider’s web, those which compose the framework, are stiff and dry; the spiral threads, however, which join them together, are coated with a substance which no little flying creature can strike against without running the risk of sticking fast.
Before you are up on a summer’s morning this wonderful creature will have manufactured what would be equivalent to two miles of elastic and sticky rope if she were as large as a six-foot man. With the skill of an experienced fish-net maker, she will, in a few hours, construct a net as large as a cartwheel, which like the whale-nets of New Zealand, though they may break with the floundering of the prey, bewilder it and tire it out with struggling.
The orb-weaver is the aerial trapper among living creatures, stretching its sticky, elastic web across the aerial runway of its prey and waiting with a patience which would drive a fisherman insane.
To insects of its own size, the orb-weaver is a hideous, bloodthirsty monster. It sinks its fangs into its struggling prey, injects a poison quite as deadly as that of the rattlesnake, and quickly sucks the blood of its victim.
ORB-WEAVER FILLED WITH A THOUSAND EGGS WHICH SHE LAYS ALL AT ONCE
(Epeira domiciliorum, Hentz)