Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/162

156 with small stones, some of them astonishingly large in proportion to the size of the spider, which she has carried up one by one from the ground. There the deadly spider lurks invisible. If you touch the nest, she rushes out, a beautiful creature, with the red patch blazing on her back like fire.

A charming little spider is a Nemoscolus (one of the Argiopidæ), which makes a curled nest just like a tiny bugle, within which she lurks. If you walk over the flats, you will see these little bugles suspended upright, mouth downwards, on the karoo bushes, about a foot from the ground. The 'bugle' is kept in position by means of about five powerful strands, tightly strained in different directions, and from its mouth radiates a beautiful little geometric web, hung over the' ground like a tiny parasol. If you take hold of the bugle, the spider rushes to its mouth, gives a quick glance round, and then drops to the earth like a plumet, where she lies, feigning death, and is by no means easy to discover.

Another genus of the same family is Argiope, which spins a good sized geometric web with a light pyramidal tangle below it. A favorite site is the open mouth of an ant-bear hole. She sits in the middle of the web, back downwards. The abdomen is large, and somewhat flat with deeply serrated edges, and both it and the cephalothorax, which is slight and to some extent overhung by the abdomen, are whitish or whitish-yellow above and darkly speckled brown and yellow below, while the legs are longish and definitely banded. If she' hung back upwards, the white would betray her, but with the lower side up it is wonderful how inconspicuous she is against the ruddy soil of the karoo. If alarmed she shakes the web until it vibrates with astonishing rapidity, so that she becomes merely a haze; and then she drops to the earth, where she either lies still on her back or clings: to a small twig low down, presenting the speckled side to the pursuer, remaining motionless and well hidden.

Yet a third genus of this family may be mentioned. Cyrtophora is often found in prickly pear (Opuntia) hedges. Here she builds a large geometric web with a dense pyramidal tangle below it, both composed of thread of immense strength. The color varies with these spiders and is of considerable beauty. The abdomen is notched above and projects over the cephalothorax to such an extent that the spider has quite a hunch-backed appearance. Like Argiope, she hangs back downwards in the middle of the web, with the pyramidal tangle below her. The threads of her web and tangle are so strong and the prickly pear hedges are at times so densely covered with them that the long stick with which one plucks the sweet ripe fruit often becomes so coated with the powerful strands and so impeded thereby that it cannot be used effectively till cleaned.