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Updated: June 10, 2025
The little birds, so many piteous heads of game, will go to market, strung in dozens on a wire passed through their nostrils. For scoundrelly ingenuity, the Epeira's net can bear comparison with the fowler's; it even surpasses it when, on patient study, the main features of its supreme perfection stand revealed. What refinement of art for a mess of Flies!
Over this framework runs a continuous spiral thread, forming chords, or cross-bars, from the centre to the circumference. It is magnificently large and magnificently symmetrical. In the lower part of the web, starting from the centre, a wide opaque ribbon descends zigzag-wise across the radii. This is the Epeira's trade- mark, the flourish of an artist initialling his creation.
The conclusion is evident: the Epeira's glue is a substance that absorbs moisture freely. In an atmosphere with a high degree of humidity, it becomes saturated and percolates by sweating through the side of the tubular threads. These data explain certain facts relating to the work of the net. The full-grown Banded and Silky Epeirae weave at very early hours, long before dawn.
More interested in animal psychology than in pyrotechnical displays, I watch the Epeira's doings, lantern in hand.
Accident, however fruitful in surprises we may presume it to be, can never have taught it the higher geometry wherein our own intelligence at once goes astray, without a strict preliminary training. Are we to recognize a mere effect of organic structure in the Epeira's art? We readily think of the legs, which, endowed with a very varying power of extension, might serve as compasses.
The alarm is given by the vibration of the web, much more than by the sight of the captured object. A very simple experiment will prove this. I lay upon a Banded Epeira's lime-threads a Locust that second asphyxiated with carbon disulphide. The carcass is placed in front, or behind, or at either side of the Spider, who sits moveless in the centre of the net.
It is the exact process employed in our wire-mills: a motor-driven spool revolves and, by its action, draws the wire through the narrow eyelet of a steel plate, making it of the fineness required, and, with the same movement, winds it round and round its collar. Even so with the Epeira's work.
Thus is marked out a very irregular polygonal area, wherein the web, itself a work of magnificent regularity, shall presently be woven. In the lower part of the web, starting from the centre, a wide opaque ribbon descends zigzag-wise across the radii. This is the Epeira's trade-mark, the flourish of an artist initialling his creation.
I place upon it a Praying Mantis, a well-developed specimen, quite capable of changing roles, should circumstances permit, and herself making a meal off her assailant. It is a question no longer of capturing a peaceful Locust, but a fierce and powerful ogre, who would rip open the Epeira's paunch with one blow of her harpoons. Will the Spider dare? Not immediately.
The two pieces of work are so much alike that I almost expected this. I then decide to effect an exchange of webs between two different species. I move the Banded Epeira to the net of the Silky Epeira and vice versa. The two webs are now dissimilar; the Silky Epeira's has a limy spiral consisting of closer and more numerous circles.
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