FURRYLEGS THE SPIDER

by Floyd Bralliar 

ABOUT nine o'clock one morning late in March, I was hurrying down the flagstone that leads to the chapel, on the campus of the Nashville Agricultural Institute, near Nashville, Tennessee. I was hurrying, for there was to be a committee meeting in this building, and I was a member of the committee and was already three minutes late. When within about fifty feet of the chapel I saw something that caused me to stop, and I fear I was much more than three minutes late when I finally reached the committee.

The thing I saw was a line of peculiar-looking spiders marching across the walk. I had never seen such burly, stubby-looking spiders before, and I had never before seen a long line of spiders march­ing single file, so I stopped to learn what was happening, and I will tell you what I found.

These spiders were as nearly alike as two baby white leghorn chickens, everyone about the size of a grain of pearled barley, and everyone a yellow­ish brown in color. Their legs were reasonably long, but they were so stocky and hairy that they looked much shorter than they really were. In fact these spiders reminded me of a lot of tiny, short-legged bulldogs. I had chanced to arrive at just the right time, for the head of the line had not passed over the walk more than three or four feet, so I got to see the leader. She differed in no way from her fellows save that she was their leader. But she clearly was their leader, for she not only marched at the head of the line, but she spun a thread of silk as she went and left it on the ground to guide the line that followed.

Evidently she had come out of a hole in the ground some twenty feet away, for the line was still coming out of this hole, not like a helter­skelter lot of boys just turned out of school, but slowly and deliberately, every one in her place. I watched to see where this general was leading her army, if I may call her a general and her followers an army.

Slowly she marched, straight to an ash tree that grew near the southeast corner of the chapel. Evidently she chose this tree be­cause it stood in such a place as to leave a free open space to the west and southwest, though I did not recognize this reason at once.

When she reached the tree she did not hesitate for an instant but marched straight up the trunk, still leaving her silken thread behind her. She went on steadily till she reached the tip of the very topmost twig. The spider next behind followed, also laying down a silken thread beside that of the leader, till she was near the top of the tree, when she branched off and climbed to the tip of another twig. So, it was with every spider that - followed, at least with every one till the silken threads they spun formed a road about a, half inch wide. Every one laid down his silken thread as he marched, and every one climbed to the tip of a twig. There was a strong but steady wind blowing from the east, so every spider climbed to the tip of a twig on the west side of the tree, so there would be nothing between it and the way the wind was blowing. When the road was wide enough for all to march on a street of silk I could not tell whether they still laid down threads or not.

By the time a score or two of spiders had climbed the tree, they began to leave the main road soon after reaching the lowest branches, but there was no regularity about where they left it or which way they climbed, except that all crept to the top of a twig that left an open space to the west.

Furrylegs was not the spider that headed the line of march, neither was she the last one to leave the hole. She marched some ten or twelve feet from the head of the line, and was distinguished from the others by her greater size and by the fact that her legs were even more fuzzy than those of her fellows. She behaved much like the others, but when she climbed the tree, she climbed to the tip of the very tallest twig except the one occupied by the leader.

When I had seen enough to know something of what was going on, I went to my committee meet­ing, but came back as soon as it was over. A faculty meeting followed the committee and it was my duty to attend it, but I kept slipping away every little while all forenoon to learn that the line of march was still unbroken and still led up the same tree. It was nearly three o'clock in the afternoon before the last spider climbed out of this hole and took her place at the end of the line.

What kind of spiders were these, why were they in that hole in the ground, how did they all happen to march to this tree on the same day, and what did they mean to do at the tip of their various twigs? These were some of the questions that interested me, and may interest you.

I was able to learn the answer to some of these questions, and I will give them to you. They were wolf spiders and belonged to the family of Ameri­can tarantulas, a family of very large spiders that usually live in holes they have burrowed in the ground. They were in this hole because it had been the home of their mother the past summer.. She had laid her eggs there the fall before and these eggs had hatched and the baby spiders had stayed in the home-nest till the weather was warm enough for them to seek homes for themselves.

I do not know whether such spiders usually all leave their home together or whether they just happened to do so this time, but I do know that this was the only time I have ever seen or even heard of such an occurrence. But this might be true, and yet hundreds of families of spiders might make such migrations every spring, for most people see very little that goes on among our little out-of-door neighbors, and many people are afraid of spiders. I do remember that for some time be­fore these spiders left their nest the weather had been cold or rainy and that this morning every­thing was favorable for starting on their journey, and it could have been that this accounted for their all going together, but I doubt it.

It did not take long for me to see that these spiders were climbing so high in the tree that I must follow if I wished to learn what they were doing there, and to climb the tree meant to mash many of the spiders. I must get a ladder in order to get up into the tree, and I had no time to do this till faculty meeting was over and I had eaten my dinner.

It was almost two o'clock in the afternoon when I brought my ladder and climbed the tree, but the line of march was still unbroken. In fact the last spider did not climb out of the hole and take her place in the line of march for some time yet, so I had a better chance to learn what they were actually doing than if I had come sooner.

This was what I learned. No sooner did a spider reach the tip of a twig than she fastened a web to it and allowed this web to float a few inches into the air, as if she were testing the strength and direction of the wind. When satisfied, she pulled in her line and began weaving it into an airplane or magic carpet which floated into the air as fast as it was done. This carpet was about a third of an inch wide, and was woven so carefully that it had much the appearance of a strip of silk cloth. Nor was its manufacture the work of a few minutes. It took a spider several hours of steady spinning to complete her work.

By three o'clock in the afternoon some of the spiders were testing their carpets. A spider would attach a thread of web to her carpet and allow it to float a foot or two out in the breeze. Then she would carefully and slowly run out on this thread to see if the carpet would support her weight. If the line sagged too much with her weight or if the carpet gave down too far when she got on it, she quickly ran back to her twig, drew the carpet in by winding up the thread that held it, and set to work, making it longer.

Before long some of the spiders had woven carpets that would support their weight nicely. As soon as a spider found her web would do this, she would break the thread that held it and clinging in the middle of the web, would float away wherever the wind carried her. Wishing to know how far a spider would travel in this way, I watched several till they passed out of sight. I had no way of finding how far such spiders flew, but have been told that they may fly for miles in this way. Some were caught in eddies of the wind and hurled to the ground only a few rods away. Whenever or wherever a spider alighted she im­mediately left her carpet. It had served its purpose She had taken her one and only flight. She had used up all the silk she could spin at one time and she could never hope to get her carpet into the air again. So she left it at once and began hunting a suitable place to dig a nest hole and establish a home of her own.

By half past three in the afternoon most of the spiders that had marched near the head of the line were taking to the air, but at dark many were still busily spinning their carpets. I looked at the tree early the next morning but no spiders were to be seen. Evidently the belated ones had gone in the night.

I noticed Furrylegs was an unusually fine speci­men when I first saw her in the line of march. When she started up the tree I marked her as worthy of further watching. She marched up the tree steadily, and without the slightest hesitation climbed the very tallest twig except the one occupied by the leader. When she started, it was noticeable that she was spinning a broader, more elaborate carpet than her neighbors. She seemed to be in no hurry to leave the tree. When the other spiders began testing their carpets she went steadily forward with her spinning. She seemed to know without trying how much she would have to spin. When she was done, it was fully three and one half inches long, a full half inch longer than any other I measured. At last she allowed it to float out into the breeze and ran out to it, not slowly and cautiously, but as if she knew it would do its work.

She settled herself in the middle of the carpet and waited till a gust of wind tore it from its moorings and whirled her high above the chapel. She was carried to the northwest for several hundred feet, when she was dashed into the top of an old hollow hard maple tree that stood just in front of the sanitarium, and here her travels were over.

This was a very old maple tree with a hole that opened into the hollow trunk about two feet from the ground. Furrylegs must have discovered this hole as she climbed down the tree, and as it was large and dark and dry she decided to live in it and save herself the trouble of digging a hole in the ground, for I found her living there a few days later. It was easy to identify her by the dot of white paint I put on her back the day she took her flight.

Here again she showed that she was an excep­tional spider, for she was the only one of her species I have ever known to live anywhere except in a hole in the ground.

A wolf spider hides in the mouth of its hole and waits for some insect to come near, when it pounces on the poor fellow and drags him inside to be eaten. They do most of their hunting by night, so are seldom seen by man.

I never saw Furrylegs catch anything to eat; but she must have found an abundance of food, for she grew like a mushroom. In a surprisingly short time her body was as much as an inch long and half an inch broad and her legs were over two inches long. She continued to grow more slowly till she was the largest spider of her species I have ever seen.

She spun a silken entrance to her home that was five or six inches across and flared like the bell of a brass horn. The edges of this silken bell were held in place by strong silken cords stretched from its rim to the edges of the hole. This opening soon narrowed into a silken tube that ran down to the decayed wood at the bottom of the hole. There was plenty of room in this dark hollow, but so far as I know the spider never ex­plored it. She stayed inside her silken home. In fact, I never discovered any door to her home except the one at the mouth of the hole.

I tried to make friends with Furrylegs, as I had years before with a great orange Argiope spider as told in " Knowing Insects Through Stories," but never succeeded in doing so. I would toss grasshoppers into her tubular silken net, but she always disappeared down its hall when I did so, and never once did she make any attempt to keep the insects from getting away. Sometimes the grasshoppers would get away and other times they fell down into the dark silken well. One or two stayed where they were put, on the threshold of the tunnel. These last might stay where they were put for hours. The spider would not go near them. Whether she ate them at night I do not know. At any rate I never found any there the second day; and such spiders do most of their hunting at night. I never knew what became of those that fell to the bottom of her hole. It was too dark to see and I could not get a light and mirrors into it without destroying her home, which I did not wish to do.

My readers may have wondered why I have mentioned Furrylegs as "she." In spiderland the females are much larger than the males, and they spin the webs, establish the homes, and do most of the work of all kinds.

The male spiders are smaller, weaker creatures that must beg for a, living at the door of their stronger sisters. This is especially true of those spiders that weave webs, or in other ways establish a home. Among spiders that weave no webs but that hunt for their prey this difference between the sexes is not so great. The males are strong enough to catch their own prey, but even they are smaller and weaker than their sisters.

Young spiders fly away when they are small, because this will scatter them widely and there will be little chance of their mating with one of their, own brothers. They sometimes float un­believable distances when they take their flight as young spiders. Ships have caught a spider's web hundreds of miles from land. Furrylegs was unfortunate when she flew only a few hundred feet.

It is not known whether the males ever spin webs and fly away with their sisters or not; but they probably do not, for in most species they either cannot, or do not, spin webs after they are grown.

Furrylegs was always at her front door unless something had frightened her away, and in time she became known to most of the patients and helpers at the Sanitarium, but none of them could make friends with her. Many of them would have been glad to kill her, but they could not get close enough to do so without using a stick, and the hole was so located that they could not hit her with a stick.

It was some time before I learned that Furrylegs fed at night. I was passing her hole one night when someone turned on the light that was on a pole so near I could see her perfectly. She had just caught a large beetle. It was so large and strong that they were having a real tussel. Finally the spider bit her prey Then she quit trying to do more than hold it, evidently knowing what would happen. I must confess I could not understand why she would quit trying to kill her prey, so stood and watched. In a few moments the beetle was dead. It had been killed by a poison she had injected when she bit it. I have since learned that most spiders kill their prey in this way, but that though their bite poisons an insect, it does a man no harm, even though a spider should bite him, a thing that seldom occurs.

Now she began leisurely eating her prey. She did not chew it up and swallow it as you and I do our food. In fact a spider has no jaws and cannot chew anything. She simply mashed it with her front feet and her antennae and sucked its blood and other juices. When she had sucked it dry, she carried it away from her home and threw it away. I found Furrylegs ate beetles more than almost any other food, possibly because more of them came close enough for her to catch them.

I never got to see this spider's eggs, for they were doubtless laid in the bottom of her den inside the tree. But she did stay in her tree all winter and did not die. This I know, not because I saw her in the winter, but because I saw her there early the next spring, and she lived there all the second summer. I never knew what became of her or when she died. When the cold weather set in the second autumn after I first met her, she disap­peared and I never saw her again. She had already lived a full year longer than most of her race, so she must have died an old spider, full of days.

The Spider

THERE are two families of large spiders that burrow in the ground. Both have at various, times and in different places been known as tarantulas. Both have at times been known as wolf spiders. Both have had the reputation of being very poisonous should they bite. The European tarantula, Lycosa tarantula has been supposed to be the cause of a nervous disease that affected thousands of people in Europe from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the disease being known as tarantism.,

Tradition and local opinion has it that the American family, llviculariid , are all poisonous, the species that lives in the southern part of the United States and southward having the reputation of being as poisonous as a rattlesnake. As a matter of fact, while their bite is as poisonous as the sting of any of the wasps or bees, there seems to be no evidence that they have ever been fatal to any one. Investigators have traced up the stories of many people who were reported to have been killed by the bite of this spider, but have always found that the death had occurred in the next neighborhood, and no one actually knew of an instance of a bite having been fatal. The writer knows persons who have been bitten without suffering any serious illness.