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148 RESOURCES OF CALIFORNIA. 



a little door on a binge, which closes by its own weight or by 

 a spring. In the top of the door are several little holes, into 

 which the tarantula can insert its claws when it w^ishes to en- 

 ter ; and so quick are its motions when terrified, that it often 

 disappears suddenly under the eyes of men pursuing it, and 

 they have great difficulty in finding its hiding-place-. The 

 door fits tightly, and is larger on the X)utside, so that it never 



sticks fast. 



The bite of the tarantula is poisonous, but not fatal— or at 

 least has never, so far as I know, proved fatal in California. It 

 rarely bites men, and generally flees when it discovers their 

 approach. The tarantulas have dangerous enemies in several 

 species of wasps, the females of which kill them by thrusting 

 eggs into their bodies. When the larvae of the wasp are 

 hatched, they make food of the carcass. So soon as the taran- 

 tula dies, the wasp drags it to her hole, usually the deserted 

 burrow of a spermophile, where she may collect twenty or 

 thirty dead tarantulas in one season. There are three differ- 

 ent species of these w^asps; one kind is blue, another yellow. 

 Sometimes the wasp darts dowm repeatedly upon the taran- 

 tula, and does not touch him except wath her egg-planter, de- 

 positing an egg at every thrust. On other occasions the two 

 grapple, and the wasp continues to insert her eggs until the 

 tarantula dies. The editor of a newspaper of Mariposa thus 

 describes the killing of a tarantula : " Some of our readers may 

 have heard of the tenacity with which the venomous tarantula 

 is pursued by an inveterate enemy, in the form of a huge wasp 

 —invariably resulting in the defeat and death of the former. 

 We were an eye-witness to one of these conflicts last week, 

 Avhile on a ramble among the adjacent hills. This is the se.i- 

 Bon when the poisonous tarantula leaves his well-fashioned 

 abode to perambulate the dusty roads and smooth paths so 

 often trod by the industrious miners, and about their haunts a 

 dozen or so may be seen any day, of this hideous enlargement 

 of the spider-race, within a circuit of a few yards, leisurely 

 wending their way along the roads and by-ways. Often have 



