PARALYZED PROVENDER 49 



ravenous object plunges its head within the breach. It drinks, 

 munches and revels in the spider's anatomy; eats from the inside 

 to the out, chews up the bony walls, continues through the cephalo- 

 thorax and finally consumes the legs. Then finding no more it 

 pauses. After five days of orgy it is time to digest. Thus the spider 

 is eaten alive, but from the first there is never a sign of protest, never 

 a twinge of pain. 



As an experiment, I secured several other spiders paralyzed by 

 the same wasp whose j*rub I have described at its meal, and subjected 

 them to various tests. One I denude of its legs, clipping them off 

 at different lengths, thereby cutting through eight different nerves. 

 From the second I clip the palpi, severing the nerves, and into the 

 abdomen of the third I thrust a slender needle. Throughout these 

 gross indignities the spiders lie quite motionless. There is no con- 

 tracting of leg stumps, no drawing in of injured palpi, no quiver of 

 punctured body. There is no response, no feeling in the creatures. 



Such is the first condition of paralysis. We find it in a host of 

 victims. The white-footed wasp, the blue huntress, the black reed- 

 wasps and many others go in quest of the spider, another wasp takes 

 frog-hoppers, still another, locusts, and there are many others that I 

 will not mention. They are a merciful crowd. Under the re- 

 spective jaws of their grubs, the victims lie completely paralyzed, 

 relieved from the tortures of gradual execution. 



The second form of paralysis is, as I have stated, much more rarely 

 met with. At the present time I know of only two wasps that afflict 

 their prey in this manner, but they will do very well as examples. 

 One is the roach-killer (Chapter III), which stores her earthen cells 

 with wood-roaches, the other, a tiny, unidentified w r asp that supplies 

 her maggots with a cricket each. Her nest is a hollow reed lying 

 upon the ground, the end of which she plugs with a great quantity 

 of wood little chunks of charcoal from the cane burnings, bits of 



