Page:Supplement to harvesting ants and trap-door spiders (IA supplementtoharv00mogg).pdf/107

 and the aërial prolongation of the tube sometimes found in nests of the wafer type.

But perhaps the most suggestive point of resemblance consists in the habit which this Tarantula possesses of covering and closing the aperture of the nest during the winter with a thin layer of materials, similar to those of which the chimney is composed, and, like them, bound together with silk. This is, in fact, an immovable wafer-door, and precisely resembles those which I have seen constructed by Nemesia Manderstjernæ, and N. Eleanora, when captive and placed in an artificial hole in the earth.

The tubes are, as has been already stated, open during the spring, and we may suppose that the spider, on the approach of warm weather, wakes up from her winter lethargy, and tears away this concealing thatch. But if one of these spiders should by chance happen to free this silk-woven thatch by cutting round some three-fourths of its circumference, so as to leave it still attached to the rim of the aperture of the nest by the remaining quarter, she would then have made for herself a veritable, though rather rude trap-door of the wafer kind.

It is most likely, however, that the spider knows what she is about and that a door to her dwelling would be the reverse of an advantage to her, for she is more powerful and swifter than the generality of European trap-door spiders, and, as she probably lives by leaping out upon and hunting her prey, she no doubt needs to have the entrance to her nest free of all encumbrance.

I am indebted to the Rev. W. G. Brackenridge for evidence of the very interesting fact that