1984] 
Miller — Geolycosa 
125 
Table 1. Observed cell frequencies of burrow establishment for Geolycosa turri- 
cola and G. micanopy under experimental conditions. B = burrow established, NB = 
no burrow established. 
G. turricola G. micanopy 
Fed Unfed Fed Unfed 
B NB B NB B NB B NB 
Vegetation 25 4 13 17 23 8 7 24 
No Vegetation 20 10 9 21 22 7 12 18 
Crevice — — — — 19 6 20 4 
No Crevice — — — — 16 9 13 11 
contingency tables. The variables were chosen because of their 
possible importance as factors in burrow construction based on 
casual and quantitative observations of laboratory and field 
populations of five species of Geolycosa ( G . turricola, G. micanopy, 
G. patellonigra, G. ornatipes, G. hubbelli and G . escambiensis). The 
variables were: 
(1) Prey/ no prey (prey) — indicating whether food was pro- 
vided during the experimental period. 
(2) Vegetation/ no vegetation (vegetation) — indicating whether 
small bits of grass were provided in the experiemental 
container. 
(3) Crevice/ no crevice (crevice) — indicating whether a de- 
pression in the burrowing surface was provided. 
(4) Burrow/ no burrow (burrow) — the “dependent” variable, 
indicating whether a burrow was constructed. Any burrow 
which was large enough to contain the spider was scored as 
an established burrow. 
For each experiment I tested two hypotheses concerning a three- 
way contingency table defined by the variables prey, burrow and 
one of the other two variables (Table 2). The experiments and 
anaylyses were performed for the two species separately for the data 
pertaining to the variable vegetation. No formal statistical 
comparison of the data for the two species was made. Analysis 
involving the variable crevice was carried out on G. micanopy 
only. The hypotheses were tested by Chi-square goodness-or-fit tests 
using Goodman’s (1970) maximum likelihood estimators to obtain 
the expected cell frequencies. 
