THE EPEIRID^E 



167 



only a little longer than wide and is proportionally smaller than 

 in insularis and thaddeus. The legs are long and slender, the 

 first pair being nearly twice as long as the body. The color is 

 most commonly light yellow, with brown markings. Sometimes 

 the abdomen is thickly spotted with red, especially toward the 

 latter part of the summer, and domiciliorum has usually gray 

 and even black markings. The cephalothorax has three dark 

 stripes not very sharply defined, and the legs have brown or 

 gray rings at the ends of the joints. The back of the abdomen 

 has a row of light spots in the middle, sometimes united into 

 a stripe, and on each side of this a row of dark 

 spots nearly surrounded by lighter color. The 

 sternum is bright yellow in the middle, and 

 the under side of the abdomen has a dark 

 center and two or three pairs of yellow spots. 



The males are usually smaller than the 

 females, but resemble them in color and mark- 

 ings. On the under side of each femur is a 

 single row of long spines. The tibia of the 

 second legs is curved more in the small than 

 in the large variety and has a row of strong 

 spines on the inner side. 



The webs are made usually just before dark, and the spider 

 stands in them more in the night than during the daytime. 

 Sometimes they make a thread from the center of the web to 

 the nest, but this is not a regular habit, as it is with insularis 



(fig- 397)- 



Very young spiders make proportionally larger nests, often on 



the ends of grasses, where their round webs are destroyed every 



day by the wind. Some of them mature as early as June, and 



others, especially of the domiciliorum variety, as late as August. 



Epeira pratensis. — This is the same size and color as Epeira 



trivittata, and lives, like that species, in grass and low bushes. 



Fig. 396. Epeira 

 pratensis, enlarged 

 four times. 



