Many stories are told of spiders coming out of their holes to listen to music, and of their being taught to come out and take food at the sound of an instrument.
CHAPTER III.
SPINNING HABITS.
That which, more than any thing else, distinguishes spiders from other animals is the habit of spinning webs. Some of the mites spin irregular threads on plants, or cocoons for their eggs; and many insects spin cocoons in which to pass through the change from larva to adult. In the spiders the spinning-organs are much more complicated, and used for a greater variety of purposes,—for making egg-cocoons, silk linings to their nests, and nets for catching insects. The spider’s thread differs from that of insects, in being made up of a great number of finer threads laid together while soft enough to unite into one.
SPINNERETS.
Fig. 16.
The external spinning-organs are little two-jointed tubes on the ends of the spinnerets, [Fig. 1], L. [Fig. 16] is the spinnerets of the same spider, still more enlarged to show the arrangement of the tubes. There is a large number of little tubes on each spinneret, and in certain places a few larger ones. [Fig. 17] is a single tube, showing the ducta which leads the viscid liquid to form the thread from a gland in the spider’s abdomen. Each tube is the outlet of a separate gland. [Fig. 18], a, shows four small tubes from a spinneret of Epeira, each with a small gland attached; and [Fig. 18], b, a large tube, with one of the large glands which extends forward the whole length of the abdomen, [Fig. 5], u.