1 66 ENTOMOLOGICAL NEWS [June, ? 2O 



in countless numbers in and over all the buildings at the resort, 

 stretching their webs on every available support. Each 

 morning the attendants, armed with brooms, would endeavor 

 to clear the webs and spiders from the dressing-rooms and 

 other more used parts of the buildings; and each succeeding 

 morning webs and spiders had reappeared as if by magic. 

 The pavilion at this resort stands over the water on piles a 

 considerable distance from shore; and the extensive spaces 

 beneath the floor of the pavilion and on the piling in general 

 harbored a seemingly inexhaustible supply of spiders which 

 each night swarmed over the buildings, seeking unoccupied 

 sites for their webs. For a year or two the plan of gathering 

 and destroying the cocoons late in the season was tried in an 

 effort to rid the place of the pest. Cocoons by the bushel 

 were gathered by the attendants working systematically 

 in and about the building and from boats beneath the pavilion. 

 This is said to have relieved the situation. Evidently, how- 

 ever, the efforts were later abandoned; for, upon visiting 

 the beach in 1918 and again in 1919, I found the spiders 

 holding undisputed sway in their wonted places, they and 

 their webs occurring everywhere. People have apparently 

 become used to the sight and correspondingly tolerant of 

 these feared but inoffensive creatures. 



It is popularly believed that several kinds of spiders occur 

 at Saltair, but I observed only one. Of this I collected several 

 hundred specimens. In this species the males, as often, are 

 formed differently from the females, are of a much lighter 

 color, and would, by the layman, naturally be regarded as a 

 distinct kind. The light abdominal markings, normally 

 yellowish in color, are not uncommonly bright red, partic- 

 ularly in the males, giving thus the "red spider," commonly 

 accounted as a third kind, which an employee at the beach 

 assured me was especially dangerous! 



The spider is one of the orb-web weavers (Argiopidae), 

 and belongs to the genus Neoscona, commonly included in 

 Aranea. the Epeira of most earlier writers. In Neoscona it 

 falls in the group in which the males have the coxae of the 

 fourth legs armed beneath with a conical process. Hereto- 



