222 



AMERICAN SPIDERS AND THEIR SPINNINGWORK. 



weaver. Her snares are found in all sorts of positions and locations. In 

 the angles of houses and walls, among leaves of trees, in shrubs and grasses, 

 in old stumps, and caves and holes in the ground, wherever a 

 Trest- footing can be had and a spinneret can be laid, this univer- 

 Floor ^'''^ occupant of outhouses and grounds proceeds to weave her 

 snare. Under all circumstances she shows rare ability to adapt 

 it to the particular site where chance has fixed her abode. If bracing is 

 required from above she sends upward a series of lines which support 

 her sheeted snare. If bracing is required from below, as we have seen 

 (Fig. 208), she sends out a series of trestle lines, which keep the sheet in 

 poise, and suggest the methods of carpenters when scaffolding a platform 

 or Hoor, or trestling a bridge. If bracing be needed both above and be- 

 low, as in the pouched snare (Fig. 209) woven between the bars of a farm 



fence, the lines are sent 

 out in the very positions 

 to give the required sup- 

 port. In fact, a civil en- 

 gineer would decide, up- 

 on examination, that his 

 profession could have sug- 

 gested no better arrange- 

 ment under the circum- 

 stances. 



In the lawns and 

 ~-= grounds around Philadelphia, and indeed almost every- 

 where in the United States, Agalena's snare will often be seen 

 spread like a broad white sheet upon the upper surface of 

 hedges and thick set plants, such as arbor vitse, boxwood, 

 and honeysuckle. Into these she works a silk lined cylindri- 

 cal tunnel, which extends to the very heart of the plant, and 

 often to the ground beneath. She manages, in some way, so to lash back 

 the stems and twigs that, in spite of the natural elasticity and growth 

 force of the plant, the tubular den or home is held quite in 

 T3 - , place. Not only so, but the sheeted web will be stayed and 



held in position by a series of lines that seem to display no 

 little skill in adjustment. She thus places a tubular bridge between her 

 foraging ground and her retreat. 



Once while visiting a brother, the late Commander Khoderick Sheldon 

 McCook, U. S. N., at his home in Vineland, N. J., my attention was called 

 by him to one of these snares of Agalena built upon an evergreen bush 

 planted in liis yard. The comments of the sailor were striking and 

 characteristic, and I regret that I cannot accurately recall them now. But 

 I well remember the amazement which he ex])ressed as he pointed to this 

 point and that in the structure of the snare, and compared it to the slirouds 



Fig. 210. Tubular work of Dysdera bicolor. 



