THE TRIANGLE SPIDER: THE ORB SECTOR. 185 
three hundred times in a minute, and in so doing they draw out a 
double line. 
“The spider moves slowly along the radius until she reaches a point (5) 
where she can step across to the next radius. While so doing, she ceases 
to draw out the double line, and carefully keeps it from contact with 
either of the radii. She then reverses her course and moves along the 
second radius to a point (6) nearly under that whence she started. The 
double line has shortened itself considerably; any slack she draws in, and 
then turning about, with her head toward the apex, she makes a second 
attachment with her spinnerets close pressed against the radius. This 
done, she again hangs from the radius, draws out the spiral line, and ad- 
vances toward the apex, crosses at 7 to the third radius, returns thereon to 
8, and makes a third attachment. She then repeats the same 
process upon the third radius, and in Fig. 7 is repre- 
sented (at 9) as y having finished about one-half of the line.” 
Thenumber 
of crossed lines } 
when the work } 
is completed va- t ie 6 
ries, according . 
to Wilder, from 
5 > 
six to sixteen. Fic. 174. Mode of spinning floc- 
culent spirals of Hyptiotes. The > 
The European Sulla nites Hom 4 ta shawa ty 
> th f th ’ ilder.) SSS 
Parado xus, ac- he course of the arrows. (After Wilder.) 
= 
» 
cording to Thorell, spins from sixteen to twenty-two. 
According to my own count the number is not constant, 
but the prevailing number is nearly sixteen. I have counted 
five, fourteen, nineteen, and twenty-two on snares in the same / 
general site. The number is not constant even with the same ¥ yy 
individual. A female that spun fourteen spirals on one day had nineteen 
the next; and like differences showed in the other parts of the snare. 
Evidently there is no mechanical necessity in the constitution of the ara- 
nead that compels it to a machine regularity of product. 
These lines are not single threads, covered with viscid beads, as in the 
case of most Orbweavers, but resemble those of Uloborus, as heretofore 
described. That is to say, as they exude from the spinnerets and cri- 
bellum, they are teased, or to borrow a word from the flax manufac- 
turer, “hackled,” by the calamistrum into a somewhat irregularly widened 
flocculent mass. 
Wilder speaks of the spiral thread as simply double lines, the two 
strands being from one five-hundredth to one two-thousandth of an inch 
_apart.1 Emerton says that it “has a strong smooth thread through the 
ip 
1 Op. cit. page 649, note. 
