by Grant Allen
Besides, the bigger the fly or bee, the harder it was likely to struggle; and Rosalind noted well, before starting, the comparative extent to which the line was convulsed, and governed herself accordingly. If a big bumble-bee or wasp fell peradventure into her coils, he plunged exceedingly; and Rosalind, prudently aware of the expected sting, approached the dangerous prey with marked reserve and caution. But when it was only a harmless small fly that struggled in the net, she rushed forth from her lair as bold as brass, seized the body with claws and jaws, and sucked the poor thing dry in less than a minute. Then she flung away its empty skin, or cut it contemptuously out of the web it had injured.
A glance at the second figure in No. 5 will show how admirably the spider’s foot is adapted for all these various purposes. Adaptation could hardly go further. The spider has claws with which she can hold her web like a hand; and she has also sharp nails which aid her not a little in manipulating her prey and her web. But she has more than all these: the claws themselves, you will note, are provided with toothed or comb-like edges; and these curious saw-teeth are useful to the spider both in arranging her webs, in weaving them tight or loose, and in feeling the line of communication, when at rest, for indications of a captured insect. If you remember that the spider has no less than eight legs, each somewhat differently provided with special claws and combs, you will understand how formidable a beast she really is to creatures of her own size or smaller.
But beneath the foot in No. 5 are represented those still more terrible organs, the mouth and poison-fang. The face is shown, end on — a full-face portrait; and the little knobs above are the eight sharp eyes with which the spider looks out for its prey when captured. Below lie the jaws, with their two movable poison-fangs, one of which is open, while the other is folded back into its groove or receptacle like a kitten’s claw. This poison-fang is supplied with venom from a gland in the head. When the spider catches an insect and desires to eat him at once (as she generally does if he is not very large) she poisons him outright, and proceeds to devour him. So she often does with a wasp or other dangerous insect. But if she wishes to preserve him for future use, she quietly envelops him in a network of web, and keeps him in durance vile, as I shall show you later — a prisoner awaiting his turn to be killed and eaten. Taking her as a whole, therefore, the mother spider is about as fiercely equipped a beast as creation can produce: a monster armed like the tiger and cobra combined; with the claws of a lion and the poison-fangs of a serpent; both which she supplements by a treacherous snare, itself a union of the net and the bird-lime trap. No wonder, with such an armoury, that she has prospered exceedingly in the struggle for existence. And, indeed, you will find garden spiders wherever you go. They are one of the most successful types in creation.
We watched our Rosalind closely through the whole of a season. It was a curious drama of blood and treachery. For the most part she lay concealed like a secret assassin in her nest behind the rose-leaf, seldom spreading her net in the sight of the victim; but sometimes, assuming the rôle of highway robber, she would boldly rest in the very centre of her snare, with her head downward, waiting for the approach of casual small insects. At such times, we noticed the larger and more intelligent flies usually gave her a wide berth; she seldom caught bluebottles or bees on these occasions of open display; but tiny gnats and midges, less careful or less wise, would get entangled in her web, and at these she would rush out viciously, sucking them dry then and there, and rejecting their empty skeletons with lordly unconcern. Her appetite was unbounded; but she grew so quick, she had so often to remake or repair her broken snare, and she was laying by so constantly for her maternal functions and her eight hundred eggs, that this did not surprise us. The web, indeed, was often torn by wasps or large flies out of all recognition; and at other times it was destroyed by the housemaid or the gardener. On an average, I should say, Rosalind had to rebuild the whole concern about once in three days; and as she was obliged to spin it all out of her own body, this came very expensive. We noticed, however, that she was economically minded, for she wasted no web; I think she ate up all loose ends or remnants: and the central portion, where she occasionally reposed on the look-out for prey, was free from the viscid beads which elsewhere adorned the cross-pieces. You see, this part of the structure was of comparatively small service as a snare, while the sticky stuff would have interfered with her own freedom of movement. She usually avoided the beaded spiral, and only ran along the stouter spokes or cables.
But the most wonderful scene of all was witnessed when Rosalind found in her net a large wasp or a blow-fly. On such occasions, she was generally resting in her nest under the rose-leaf, with one foot held firmly on the cord of communication. If a light pull only came, she would rush wildly forth, and seize in a frenzy the small fly that caused it. She seemed as if drunk with lust of carnage. But when the strength of the pull showed her that a large bee or wasp was struggling in the web, she would act in various ways according to the needs of the moment. Wasps she approached, we noticed, with considerable fear; she knew their dangerous nature. But she was seldom afraid, even so, of tackling them; though at times, if a very large and truculent specimen got entangled in the web, she seemed to despair of landing him. In such cases, she would cut him out bodily, by biting the threads, and let him drop at once, thankful, like Dogberry, to be rid of a knave. A moderate-sized wasp, however, she would rush out and attack in that frenzy of rage and hunger, a sort of mad, blind rage, which one often notices in fierce carnivorous animals. She would begin her onslaught near the victim’s head, avoiding his sting, and envelop him in web, till his wings were pinioned; then she would cautiously approach nearer and nearer to the tail, but give the actual sting a wide berth till the conclusion of operations. The wasp, meanwhile, would keep protruding his poisoned lance in evident fury, striking wildly at the air; while the spider continued to suck him dry quietly, from the head backward, without the slightest consideration for his feelings as a living animal. I may add (to anticipate an obvious criticism) that I am aware the sting-bearing wasp is a female; I have only treated her here to a masculine pronoun because it helps to discriminate her better in each sentence from my friend Rosalind.
In No. 6, our intrepid Rosalind is represented in the act of attacking a blow-fly which has buzzed noisily into the web. The moment her delicate foot on the line informs her that a large insect has got entangled in her toils, she rushes angrily out, and begins at once to envelop him. In this case, however, her intention is not to devour him on the spot; she means to store her larder with provisions for future use, and is as careless as ever of the feelings of her victim. No. 7 shows with what bands she proceeds to swathe him. She catches him firmly as fast as she can, so as to prevent his furious struggles from unnecessarily destroying her precious web; then she trundles and bundles him rapidly in a sort of treadmill or merry-go-round, with her front pair of legs; holds on to the web and steadies herself with her two middle pairs; and uses her hind pair, with her comb-like claws, to distribute the silk which she winds in coils about his wings and body. You can see now how useful are her eight legs to her. Each fulfils its own function. In about a minute she has twirled him round and round, and swaddled him firmly in a strong silken covering. I regret to say she does not then proceed to eat him at once, but keeps him imprisoned in torture for an indefinite period, tightly bound in silken cords, till she desires to dine off him. The unhappy fly is bound hand and foot — or, rather, wing and leg — till it is absolutely incapable of the least resistance; it is then kept in its close prison with a cruelty more than mediæval, and at last devoured alive piecemeal by its ruthless captor. The morals of spiders are scarcely better than those of Chinamen.
Rosalind’s changes of costume were also most theatrical and interesting. Like her namesake in the play, she appeared every now and again in a different suit of clothes, and rejected her old ones. The manner of making the new suit, however, and of shuffling off the old, was extremely interesting. She moulted
periodically; but at each moult the whole external skeleton was sloughed off, like a snake’s skin or a lobster’s coat, entire; and a new one grew under it.
In No. 8 Mr. Enock has luckily caught our heroine just at the moment of such a moult. She is dropping out of her old skin, by means of her threads; beneath it, the new one has grown, the animal being thus quite literally accommodated with a fresh suit “while you wait.” The way the old skin hangs up is curious and typical. At first the new outer coat is soft and yielding, like the freshly moulted skeleton or armour of a crab or lobster; but it soon hardens, and not infrequently advantage is taken of the moult to replace parts that have been accidentally lost or broken off, such as a leg or a feeler. The economical spider, however, never wastes anything: she does not throw away the old suit; as soon as her jaws have grown hard enough, it is eaten up by the owner, and thus used over again in the production of web or body material. If thrift be a virtue, no beast on earth possesses more than a spider.
I have left to the last the delicate question of the domestic relations of spiders, which are certainly not of a sort to be commended for imitation. The lady spider, indeed, too closely resembles the late Mr. Deeming and the natives of Fiji in her unsatisfactory notions of conjugal affection. I regret to say it is her reprehensible habit to devour alive her unsuccessful suitors, and sometimes also the father of her own children. These are unamiable traits, but I must not conceal them. You will observe, no doubt, that throughout I have said comparatively little of the masculine spider, and much of his lady; and I have done this of set purpose; for spiders are a group in which the dominance of the females is marked and undeniable. The matriarchate prevails; the females are the race, and the males exist only as lazy drones, mere idle fathers of future generations. This being so, the mother spider, true to her thrifty ideas, regards them in the light of necessary evils; and being always economical, she thinks it well to utilise them for the purposes of the race by eating them up the moment they have fulfilled their sole and single marital function.
This peculiar habit makes the courtship of spiders a grim tragi-comedy, well worth observing. In No. 9 Mr. Enock has represented one salient scene in the painful drama. And this is the interpretation thereof. Two male spiders have come to pay their court to the supercilious Rosalind. She, good lady, sits unconcerned but watchful in the centre or hub of her snare, apparently careless of the two eager postulants for her hand and heart, but in reality observing them with critical eyes, and ready to rush out and devour them if they fail to please her. The gentlemen, accordingly, have to be very artful. They go through strange antics. Now they approach her cautiously, very much on the alert, ready to pull the string and advertise her of their presence, but also prepared to turn and run, or to cut the line and drop, if she does not regard their advances with favour. Now again they retreat, alarmed at her aspect. Rosalind sulks in her web, and waits to see which of the two she prefers, if either. Should the fit so seize her, she will accept one or other of her ardent suitors; but should she happen to be hungry or else to be disappointed, or in an ill-humour, she may dart out upon them at once and make a meal off-hand of her devoted admirer.
Even the successful suitor himself is by no means safe; for it is Rosalind’s way, when she tires of a lover, not to nag and quarrel, but to devour him outright, and look out for another. This saves time and trouble, and is better in the end for the temper of the species.
When autumn comes, Rosalind lays her eggs in a cocoon, and fastens them on the under side of a stone or piece of wood, where they hatch out in spring, and so the whole story of her life begins over again. She herself, meanwhile, retires to winter quarters, where she passes the cold months under shelter in a state of more or less torpidity. It is not known exactly how long a spider lives; but they continue for at least two or three years, and probably much longer. We had Rosalind under examination for two successive summers.
The family to which Rosalind belongs, that of the geometrical spiders, may be placed at the very head of the whole spider order. Its webs are the most perfect in architecture, are the best planned as snares, and have a strict monopoly of the sticky beads, which help to entangle the prey, and which are also, under the microscope, most beautiful objects, decked in prismatic colours, and looking like so many iridescent opals. In shape and markings these spiders are also superior to the common run of eight-legged beasts, though they are certainly less beautiful than some of the lovely green and variegated semi-transparent field-spiders. It would not be going too far to say that the geometrical web-makers are the most advanced and civilised members of the entire group. For there are degrees of evolution among these hunting carnivores. Some of the least advanced kinds merely stalk or hunt down their prey on the open. These lower savages among the spider tribe lurk under stones or in the crevices of bark, and rush out at their victims, or spring upon them unawares. One may compare them to such low hunting human races as the natives of New Guinea or the North American Indians. Others, again, construct tubes, with or without trap-doors, and catch their prey more or less cunningly near the entrance. Yet others, once more, weave irregular webs, among leaves and twigs, or in the corners of rooms, and trust rather to mere meshes than to sticky substances. But the geometrical web-weavers, the most advanced of their kind, have learned by the experience of ages how to construct a regular snare, on a fixed ground-plan, and to supplement it by a singular trick of beady bird-lime.
Even among the geometrical web-weavers themselves, again, there are marked varieties of progress and culture. For some kinds have only three claws to each foot, while others have more; and there are certain species which possess in addition a sort of opposable thumb, so that they can catch things as with a hand, feeling them all round, and grasping their threads as a sailor grasps a cable. Such opposable thumbs are always accompanied by high intelligence, as one sees in man, in the monkeys, in the opossum, and in the parrot.
Indeed, all round, it may be safely said that the spiders as a group stand at the head of the animals with jointed bodies; and that the geometrical tribe in particular stand at the head of all the spiders. Nor must we consider that their cruelty and ferocity put them out of court in this connection; for man himself, taking him in the mass, is one of the most ruthless of animals; and the bees, which by universal consent rank among the highest insects, are the group which most universally slaughter their own brothers, the drones, as soon as the community has no further use for them. The fact is that Nature as a whole is intensely utilitarian; each kind fights for its own hand alone, and regards as little the feelings of other kinds as the fisherman regards the feelings of herrings, or as the fishmonger minds the objection of lobsters to be boiled alive for our human convenience. A race that skins living eels at Billingsgate, and decks its hats with egrets in Hyde Park, has no just ground of complaint, after all, against my poor, misguided, husband-eating Rosalind.
IV. A WOODLAND TRAGEDY
NATURE is rich in tragedies; but somehow, the tragedies which are long familiar to us cease to be tragic. We accept them as merely picturesque little episodes in our daily existence. Nobody is astonished, for example, when a cat plays with a mouse before killing it; nor when she teaches her attentive kittens how to let it go in sport, maimed and half dead; it does not shock us when the poor dazed little beast, thinking the danger over, makes a wild burst for freedom, that she shows them how to pat it with one cruel paw and still further disable it. Facts like these are too common and too long known to appeal to us strongly. We note them with a very languid interest. But when people first learn some unfamiliar example of Nature’s cruelty, I almost always find they are profoundly struck by it. The novelty of the case gives it vividness and makes it sink in deep. And I know no instance which impresses the ordinary observer so much at sight as the first time when, wandering accidentally through some peaceful copse or wood, he finds himself face to face with that hateful hoard, a butcher-bird’s larder.
For what the cat does with the mouse for a few shor
t moments, that the butcher-bird does with it through long lingering days and nights of agony. He impales his mouse alive on the stout thorn of some may-bush, and keeps it there, maimed but struggling, or slowly dying, for a week at a time, until he has need for it as food for himself or his family.
A clever artist devised a cover for one of our popular scientific papers many years ago, which enforces well the universality of this ceaseless struggle of kind against kind, each wholly regardless of the other’s feelings. In the centre foreground, a fly flits airily over the surface of a river, searching for its mate in the full joy of existence. Beneath, a small fish jumps up at the fly, and seems in the very act of seizing and swallowing it. Behind and below, however, a pike lies grimly in wait for the small fish with open mouth; but he is anticipated by a kingfisher, which snatches it from his jaws before they can close over it. In the background above, a hawk poises itself on even wings, ready to swoop down in triumph at last on the successful kingfisher. There you have the epic of animal life in brief; you have only to throw in an angler on the bank, fishing for the pike with a live-bait of minnow, and an enthusiastic ornithologist pointing his fowling-piece at the rare species of hawk, in order to complete the whole cycle of slaughter. And observe that each actor in this drama of death is as careless as to the life he sacrifices and the pain he causes as the angler is careless as to the feelings of the minnow he impales upon his barbed hook, or the sportsman is careless as to the feelings of the happy birds he brings down with his cartridges.