The Structure and Habits of Spiders

by J. H. Emerton

Several spiders were placed together, and made to bite one another. The bitten ones lived always some hours, and died from loss of blood; and one spider, that had been bitten in the abdomen so that some of the liver escaped and dried on the outside, lived over a year, apparently in good health.

A large spider was made to bite a wasp near the base of the right front-wing, so as to disable it; but it lived thirteen hours.

A bee was bitten by a large spider, but lived three days.

A grasshopper was bitten, and held in the jaws of a spider for several seconds; but it lived in apparent health for two days.

Insects of the same kinds were wounded in the same places with needles, and died in about the same time as when bitten.

From these experiments Mr. Blackwall was led to believe that the secretion from the spider’s jaws is not poisonous, but that insects die, when bitten, from loss of blood and mechanical injury.

Mr. Moggridge, who studied the habits of trap-door spiders for several years, was more than once bitten by them, but never had any pain or inflammation from the bites.

The bites of Latrodectus guttatus of the south of Europe, and an allied species in California, are much dreaded, but probably as much on account of the size and conspicuous colors of the spider as any thing else.

The Tarantula, also a south European spider, has been supposed to cause epilepsy by its bites, which could only be relieved by music of particular kinds. These stories appear, however, to be all nonsense: at any rate, the Tarantula bites produce no such effect nowadays. These spiders live in holes in sand, out of which they rush after passing insects, and may be caught by a straw moved carefully over the holes like an insect. They are no more savage in their habits than other spiders; and Dufour kept one that soon learned to take flies from his fingers without biting him.

Spiders of very different species soon learn to take food from the hand or a pair of forceps, or water from a brush, and will come to the mouth of their bottle, and reach after it on tiptoe.