I hoped that this spider might lay eggs in her prison,[150] and therefore broke up her nest from time to time after my return to London in order to search for them. Between the 27th of May (when her nest had been transferred into a box of earth) and the 6th of October I destroyed her dwelling four times, and after each demolition she furnished the cylindrical hole which I bored for her with a lid, having thus made five doors since her capture. I got no eggs however, though the spider appeared in perfect health.
[150] Strange to say, though I have opened so many nests at different seasons of the year, and found young apparently quite recently hatched, I have never been able to find the eggs of a trap-door spider.
Neither this spider nor the true N. cæmentaria of Montpellier appears to have any idea of digging a hole when placed on soft earth if they are adult; and the same thing is true of N. Manderstjernæ and N. Eleanora, but the young of all these spiders readily excavate nests for themselves.
I have once seen a nearly full grown, and probably adult, Cteniza Moggridgii make a perfect tube and furnish it with a moveable door in a single night when confined under gauze on moist earth, but this is the only instance (except that of Cteniza Californica, recorded above) in which I have known an adult trap-door spider excavate or attempt to do so.
These Ctenizas seem to be peculiarly able to adapt themselves to circumstances, for two young ones, which I sent by post to M. Lucas at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris in little wide-mouthed, cylindrical, blue glass bottles, not only lined the bottles with silk but also closed them at the mouth with a door fitting accurately into a bevelled lip, in the manufacture of both of which fragments of moss, the only material at their disposal, were used in place of earth.[151] It is curious to see how quickly the young trap-door spiders, both of the cork and wafer kinds, when taken from the nest of the mother, will make their own perfect little dwellings in captivity, and I have known them construct tube and door within fifteen hours.
[151] M. H. Lucas, in Bull. des Séances de la Soc. Entom. de Fr. No. 27 (1874), p. 101.
I have watched the proceedings of the young spiders, when taken from the mother's nest, in the following species: Nemesia Manderstjernæ, N. Eleanora, N. congener, and N. Moggridgii, the three first constructing wafer, and the last a cork nest. All of these very young spiders will excavate their own tubes and bring out pellets of the earth, which closely resemble those carried out from their galleries by the ants.
As has been stated before, the young brood, while still in the mother's nest, will often comprise individuals of different sizes, and though the majority are no larger than the baby-spider represented at Fig. B 2, Pl. IX, Ants and Spiders, some may occasionally be found that are fully twice as large.
The little nests which they make in captivity vary accordingly in size. Thus, out of sixteen young taken from the mother's nest (N. Eleanora), eleven, three days after capture, had made nests in the earth of a flower-pot, and the wafer doors of six of these nests measured 2 lines across, of four 21/2 lines, and of one 3 lines. The first nests of another similar lot of young Eleanora spiders had wafer doors measuring respectively 2, 21/2, 21/2, 3 and 3 lines. In another case when I captured fourteen young (the entire brood found in the nest of the mother, N. Manderstjernæ), after the lapse of five days every one of them had made a nest, but these were smaller and more uniform, ten of the wafer doors measuring 2 lines across, one 11/2, and one 21/2.