1967] 
Levi — Behavior of Sicarius 
3 21 
There is an enormous literature on courtship, partially summarized 
by Kaestner (1965, and in press). The possible mating positions are 
summarized by Kaston (1948). In the Orthognatha and many hap- 
logynes, the male stands with his body at an angle to that of the 
female, or with his dorsum applied to her venter, the partners facing 
opposite directions. In others, mainly hunting spiders, the male 
mounts the back of the female, facing in the opposite direction. In 
many web spiders he crawls under the female, venter to venter, facing 
the same direction. In others the male and female position themselves 
venter to venter facing opposite directions. In some, the female lies 
on her side with the male over her. In most haplogynes both pedi- 
palps are inserted at the same time; in other than haplogynes only 
one is used or, more commonly, the pedipalps are alternated. 
Dabelow, in a recent paper (1958), described differences in mating 
position of different “races” of the haplogyne Scytodes thoracica 
from the Mediterranean, Dalmatia and central Europe. The female 
has sclerotized grooves on the venter of the abdomen which receive 
the jaws of the male during copulation. Females of the Mediter- 
ranean race took a vertical position with the male horizontal. In the 
central European race both tended to assume a vertical position facing 
the same direction. In the Dalmatian race the male crawled under 
the female and mated venter to venter. As no taxonomic revision of 
European Scytodes exists, it is difficult to interpret the results. The 
variation in mating position might reflect geographical variation or 
the “races” may actually represent separate species. Whatever the 
factors, apparently this behavior is not as conservative as formerly 
thought. A Scytodes sp. from Arizona was observed by W. Eberhard 
(unpublished) to take still another position. Its chelicerae did not 
bite into the sclerotized abdominal grooves at all during mating. 
One family not represented in any of these studies and never 
heretofore recorded is the Sicariidae, a small family of spiders mainly 
of the southern hemisphere, Africa and South America. Sicariids, 
as an adaptation to their mainly arid and hot desert habitat, bury 
themselves in sand (Reiskind, 1966) and sand grains from their 
surroundings adhere to their setae, giving the spiders the color of their 
background. Scytodes is often erroneously placed by European arach- 
nologists in the haplogyne family Sicariidae. Most European arach- 
nologists are completely unaware of the nature of Sicarius having 
seen only preserved specimens. Judging by the observations to follow, 
the families Scytodidae and Sicariidae, while related, are nevertheless 
distinct. 
