THE TARANTULA’S BAG
You will be surprised to hear how devoted this terrible Tarantula is to her family.
Early one morning in August, I found a Tarantula spinning on the ground a silk network covering an extent about as large as the palm of one’s hand. It was coarse and shapeless, but firmly fixed. This is the floor on which the Spider means to work. It will protect her nest from the sand.
On this floor she weaves a round mat, about the size of a fifty-cent piece and made of superb white silk. She thickens the outer part of it, until it becomes a sort of bowl, surrounded by a wide, flat edge. Upon this bowl she lays her eggs. These she covers with silk. The result is a pill set in the middle of a circular carpet.
With her legs she takes up and breaks off one by one the threads that keep the round mat stretched on the coarse floor. At the same time, she grips this sheet with her fangs, lifts it by degrees, tears it from its base, and folds it over upon the globe of eggs. It is hard work. The whole thing totters, the floor collapses, heavy with sand. The Tarantula, by a movement of her legs, casts these soiled shreds aside. She pulls with her fangs and sweeps with her broom-like legs, till she has pulled away her bag of eggs.
It is like a white-silk pill, soft and sticky to the touch, as big as an average cherry. If you look closely, you will notice, running horizontally around the middle, a fold which a needle is able to raise without breaking it. This is the edge of the circular mat, drawn over the lower half of the bag. The upper half, through which the young Tarantulas will go out, is less well protected: its only wrapper is the silk spun over the eggs immediately after they were laid.
Inside, there is nothing but the eggs: no mattress, no soft eider down, like that of the Banded Spider. This Tarantula has no need to guard her eggs against the weather, for the hatching will take place long before the cold weather comes.
The mother has been busy the whole morning over her bag. Now she is tired. She embraces her dear pill and remains motionless. I shall see her no more to-day. Next morning I find the Spider carrying her bag of eggs slung behind her.
For three weeks and more the Tarantula trails the bag of eggs hanging to her spinnerets. When she comes up from her shaft to lean upon the curb and bask in the sun, when she suddenly retires underground in the face of danger, and when she is roaming the country before settling down, she never lets go her precious bag, though it is a very inconvenient burden in walking, climbing or leaping. If, by some accident, it become detached from the fastening to which it is hung, she flings herself madly on her treasure and lovingly embraces it, ready to bite the person who would take it from her. She restores the pill to its place with a quick touch of her spinnerets, and strides off, still threatening.
Towards the end of summer, every morning, as soon as the sun is hot, the Tarantulas come up from the bottom of their burrows with their bags and station themselves at the opening. Earlier in the season they have taken long naps on the threshold in the sun in the middle of the day; but now they ascend for a different reason. Before, the Tarantula came out into the sun for her own sake. Leaning on the parapet, she had the front half of her body outside the pit and the back half inside. Her eyes took their fill of light; the body remained in the dark. When carrying her egg-bag the Spider reverses her position: the front is in the pit, the rear outside. With her hind-legs she holds the white pill, bulging with germs, lifted above the entrance; gently she turns and re-turns it, so as to present every side to the life-giving rays of the sun. And this goes on for half the day, as long as the temperature is high; and it is repeated daily, with exquisite patience, during three or four weeks. To hatch its eggs, the bird covers them with the quilt of its breast; it strains them to the furnace of its heart. The Tarantula turns hers in front of the hearth of hearths: she gives them the sun as an incubator.