148 RESOURCES OF CALIFORNIA. 
a little door on a hinge, which closes by its own weight or by 
aspring. In the top of the door are several little holes, into 
which the tarantula can insert its claws when it wishes 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 outside, 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 larve 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 tarautulas in one season. There are three differ- 
ent species of these wasps; one kind is blue, another yellow. 
Sometimes the wasp darts down repeatedly upon the taran- 
tula, and does not touch him except with her egg-planter, de- 
positing au 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, 
while on a ramble among the adjacent hills. This is the sea- 
son 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 a’ong the roads and by-ways. Often have 
