Lost in the Jungle; Narrated for Young People

by Paul B. Du Chaillu

BIT BY A SPIDER.

At any rate, if birds are caught in their webs, it must be very seldom. But if their webs do not catch birds, they are tremendous traps for flies, wasps, beetles, and insects of all kinds; for I have never long watched one of them without seeing some living thing of one kind or another caught, and then immediately the big, long-legged spider would come swiftly and suck the blood of the victim; two or three suckings would finish up a common black fly. They are very voracious, and attack the prey with great vigor.

They must like the powerful sun, for many of their webs are built in the open spaces where Master Sol has his own way. The rain can not incommode them as he does us.

When one of these webs is finished it will remain perfect a long time; sometimes it will stand for months before the owner begins to make another.

One day in the forest I spied not far from the ground, just by an old dead tree, a little bit of a long-legged spider waging a terrible conflict with a caterpillar, which, without exaggeration, must have been at least thirty or forty times larger than the body of the little, slender, and long-legged spider. I immediately took from my pocket my magnifying-glass, in order to see better; then saw, about four inches from the ground, spreading from under the dead branch of the tree, several threads of a web which hung down, embracing a space of four or five inches, and ending in one thread as it came near the caterpillar. That single thread was entangled in the hair of the caterpillar and round its neck, and the caterpillar hung by it. The end of his body scarcely touched the ground. Then there was a desperate struggle. I suppose the caterpillar, before being caught, was down on the ground quietly eating some leaves, and the spider dropped down upon it like a wild beast would pounce upon its prey.

I lay flat on the ground to look at the conflict. This time the long legs of the spider were of the same use to it as were those of the wasp in the other fight I have related.

For a long while there was a great struggle, the caterpillar shaking and turning round and round as it hung by that single thread; often its body would twist into a circle, the end touching the head, when suddenly, at one of these twists, the spider, by some dexterous movements, spun one of its threads round the caterpillar, binding the tail to the head. The caterpillar, by a desperate effort, broke the thread, and freed the lower part of its body. The spider was so small that I had to use the magnifying-glass all the time in order to watch its movements. At first the attention of the spider was entirely engaged in securing its prey. When the caterpillar was struggling hard to disentangle itself, it would come down and spin thread after thread round the hairy body of its victim, and then unite them to the single thread.

Now and then, with its pincers, which appeared through the magnifying-glass to be very large in comparison with the size of the body, it would try to cut the large pincers of the caterpillar. The end of its long legs, as they came round the head and eyes of the caterpillar, seemed to annoy it terribly, to judge by the struggles of the worm. At last the spider succeeded in seizing the base of the right pincer of the caterpillar, and tried to cut it, but in vain. In less than fifteen seconds it returned to the task, and went at the left pincer, but with apparently no better success. Then, after a while, its attacks were directed to a spot between the pincers. He kept at it and kept at it, apparently sucking the blood, till finally, after thirty-seven minutes of deadly conflict, the caterpillar, a mammoth in comparison with the size of the spider, hung dead. Then the spider finished sucking the blood of its victim. While the spider was carrying on this deadly combat, it did not mind me when I touched its web with a little stick: it would just ascend the single thread by which it was suspended, and then, within a few seconds, would return to the fight. After the caterpillar had been killed, when I touched the web it would go up, and remain there for a long time—three or four minutes—before it came down. Finally I took hold of the caterpillar; down came the spider, and with him part of his web. The spider ran along the ground for a few inches, then suddenly rolled itself into a ball and lay apparently dead, the legs being twisted round the body. It appeared to me that the spider thought a wasp was going to attack it, and thus protected itself.

After a little while I came to look at the poor dead caterpillar, and saw a few ants hard at work carrying it off somewhere to be devoured.