Word: spider
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...Aranea manages this was, for a long time, a puzzle to observers. Then says Author Crompton, "the secret came out." The spider simply twangs the glued tieline, as a bass fiddle player twangs the strings of his instruments. The glue is thus shaken into exactly equidistant droplets...
...some other small and harmless insect, she drinks its blood on the spot, or paralyzes it with poison from her fangs and takes it to her lair to be kept in storage. If the catch is a big, vigorous, dangerous intruder (a honeybee or a grasshopper), the spider turns her back and squirts out silk in a broad band from all her 600 spinnerets. Only when the victim is trussed up and helpless in silken swathes does Aranea tow it away to the slaughterhouse...
Frightened Cardinal. Not many kinds of spider kill as elegantly as Aranea. One called Agelena makes a heavy sheet web that she spreads out on a bush or hedge, where it looks like a flimsy, dirty handkerchief. Agelena has no glue, and she must subdue her victim before he breaks loose. This involves violent battles and considerable risk every time she tackles something that can fight. But Agelena is a big spider (her body is three-quarters of an inch long), and she has an advantage which one arachnologist has neatly compared to that of a man on skis chasing...
...House spiders, whose implacable enemy is the housewife, make thick, haphazard webs which Author Crompton regards as a mess. This spider spins only at night, but works indefatigably, and is willing to mend and patch. The only mouse ever recorded as caught and killed by a spider was the victim of a house spider. In Britain, the biggest house spider has a body nearly an inch long, and, counting the legs, is four inches across. This monster is called "the cardinal," because once, at Hampton Court, one scared the 16th Century's Cardinal Wolsey almost to death...
Stupid Wolf. Among the arachnids which do not make webs are the "wolf spiders" or hunters, which live in little parapets like watchtowers, from which they leap forth and run down their prey by sheer speed. This group includes the stupid Lycosa, which, when deprived of her cocoon containing young, will accept a cork ball of the same shape and fondle it tenderly. There is also the jumping spider, which stalks her prey like a cat, and pounces when in range. The jumping spider has the best eyesight of all arachnids, with four of her eight eyes on the flattened...