Page:Harvesting ants and trap-door spiders. Notes and observations on their habits and dwellings (IA harvestingantstr00mogg).pdf/164

 Certain nests which were furnished with two doors of the cork type were observed by Mr. S. S. Saunders in the Ionian Islands. The door at the surface of these nests was normal in position and structure, but the lower one was placed at the very bottom of the nest and inverted, so that, though apparently intended to open downwards, it was permanently closed by the surrounding earth. The presence of a carefully constructed door in a situation which forbade the possibility of its ever being opened seemed, indeed, something difficult to account for. However, it occurred to Mr. Saunders that, as these nests were found in the cultivated ground round the roots of olive-trees, they may occasionally have got turned topsy-turvy when the soil was broken up. The spider then, finding her door buried below in the ground and the bottom of the tube at the surface, would have either to seek new quarters or to adapt the nest to its altered position, and make an opening and door at the exposed end. In order to try whether one of these spiders would do this Mr. Saunders placed a nest, with its occupant inside, upside down in a flower-pot. After the lapse of ten days a new door was made, exactly as he had conjectured it would be, and the nest presented two doors like those which he had found at first.

There is a specimen of one of these inverted nests, with its two doors, in the British Museum, and this might easily be supposed, at first sight, to be an example of a new kind of double-door nest. On close inspection, however, it will be seen that one of the