Page:Harvesting ants and trap-door spiders. Notes and observations on their habits and dwellings (IA harvestingantstr00mogg).pdf/145

 grass, moss, ferns, pellitory, or the like, the stems of the sheltering plants being interwoven with and made to support the tube. In every case the second door, which is designed for resistance and requires a firm-*walled tube into which it may be wedged, is below ground, and for the same reason we scarcely ever find cork nests constructed with any part of the tube projecting beyond the surface of the soil.

At fig. A, Plate XI., one of these branched nests is seen concealed in a plant of ceterach fern, and here the tube is raised a short way above the soil; while in fig. B of the same plate the common form is represented, the upper door lying flat on the surface of the ground, from which, thanks to its covering of small mosses, it is scarcely to be distinguished.

The figs. B 1 and B 2 show this door open and the lower door in its two positions.

Now that attention has been drawn to the existence of this new type of nest, I fully expect that Nemesia meridionalis will be found at many points along the Riviera and in the whole Mediterranean region, but I have hitherto only discovered it at Mentone and Cannes. Mrs. Boyle saw one of these nests in the Pallavicini gardens near Genoa, and there seems every reason to believe that certain nests which have been detected near Naples and in Ischia, will, when better known, be found to be of the branched double-door type.

It seems probable that our spider belongs to the species which was first described by M. Costa, under