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Updated: June 7, 2025
By day it remains concealed in its den, whence it issues at night to feed on larvæ and worms, devouring cockroaches and their pupæ, and attacking the millepeds, gryllotalpæ, and other fleshy insects. Mr. EDGAR L. LAYARD has described an encounter between a Mygale and a cockroach, which he witnessed in the madua of a temple at Alittane, between Anarajapoora and Dambool.
The door closes of itself and is supplied, in case of need, with a lock consisting of a few threads. No burglar, led astray by the multiplicity of arches, one and all alike, will ever discover how the fugitive vanished so suddenly. While the Clotho displays a more simple ingenuity as regards her defensive machinery, she is incomparably ahead of the Mygale in the matter of domestic comfort.
The accuracy of her statement has since been impugned by a correspondent of the Zoological Society of London, on the ground that the mygale makes no net, but lives in recesses, to which no humming-bird would resort; and hence, the writer somewhat illogically declares, that he "disbelieves the existence of any bird-catching spider."
The Mygale is found abundantly in the northern and eastern parts of the island, and occasionally in dark unfrequented apartments in the western province; but its inclinations are solitary, and it shuns the busy traffic of towns.
One is extremely abundant on the pampas, the Mygale fusca, a veritable monster, covered with dark brown hair, and called in the vernacular aranea peluda hairy spider. In the hot month of December these spiders take to roaming about on the open plain, and are then everywhere seen travelling in a straight line with a slow even pace.
They were the size of the English linnet, and probably male and female. One was quite dead, the other lay dying under the body of the spider, and was smeared with the filthy liquor or saliva exuded by the monster. The mygale carries its eggs enclosed in a cocoon of white silk of a very close tissue, formed of two round pieces uniting at their borders.
Fear-inspiring is the appearance of the great crab-spider the Mygale avicularia, one genus of the formidable Arachnida family with a body two inches in length, and, when the legs are expanded, seven inches across, covered entirely with coarse grey, reddish hairs.
Separated by marked peculiarities both of structure and instinct, from the spiders which live in the open air, and busy themselves in providing food during the day, the Mygale fasciata is not only sluggish in its habits, but disgusting in its form and dimensions. It is familiar to Europeans in Ceylon, who have given it the name, and ascribed to it the fabulous propensities, of the Tarentula.
This circumstance, however, did not in his opinion affect the case of the Mygale; and even as regards the Epeira, Mr. MacLeay, who witnessed the occurrence, was inclined to believe the instance to be accidental and exceptional; "an exception indeed so rare, that no other person had ever witnessed the fact." Subsequent observation has, however, served to sustain the story of Madame Merian.
The fairy gossamer, scarce seen, a creature of wind and sunshine; the gem-like Epeira in the centre of its Starry web; even the terrestrial Salticus, with its puma-like strategy, certainly appeal more to our aesthetic feelings than does the slow heavy Mygale, looking at a distance of twenty yards away, as he approaches you, like a gigantic cockroach mounted on stilts.
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