Page:Supplement to harvesting ants and trap-door spiders (IA supplementtoharv00mogg).pdf/74

 *table. It is probable that those trap-door spiders which inhabit nests with short tubes, and which therefore can be transported nest and all, would be less disconcerted by imprisonment than is the case with other kinds living at the bottom of a long burrow which it is almost impossible to carry away entire. This is borne out by what has been related (Ants and Spiders, p. 122) of the habits of ''Cteniza ionica'' in captivity, which not only endured to have its nest set upside down in a flower-pot, but actually furnished the inverted base of the tube with a door appropriate to its new position.

Canon Tristram (the well-known author and naturalist) was so kind as to send me two trap-door nests from Palestine for inspection; these were small cork nests, the doors of which resembled those of the Mentonese Cteniza (Ct. Moggridgii), but the tubes were exceedingly short, and that of the more perfect specimen, as I gather from Canon Tristram, measured only two inches and an eighth in length when entire.

The nests of Cteniza ionica are but little longer, and that of the Mentonese Cteniza, though never so shallow as these, are far less deep than those of Nemesia cæmentaria, the builder of the typical cork nest.

And now we will leave the nests of the cork type and their inhabitants, and turn to the more intricate group of nests belonging to the wafer type. Following the order indicated in the diagrams, we will begin with the simplest type of all, fig. C, and afterwards take the remaining types one after the other, advancing until we reach the most complex type, G.