Page:Harvesting ants and trap-door spiders. Notes and observations on their habits and dwellings (IA harvestingantstr00mogg).pdf/172

• lished records of the nests of spiders belonging to the

sub-order Territelariæ, with a view, if possible, to trace out the geographical range of the several types of structure. I have, however, met with but a small amount of success, and even among the limited number of tolerably complete accounts of nests which I have been able to discover, several made no mention of the spider to which the nest belongs.

Prof. Ausserer^[1] has enumerated 215 species of Territelariæ as having been found in the world at large, but of this large number ten only, as far as I have been able to learn, have been described in connexion with their nests, and eight of these belong to the Mediterranean region.^[2] To these we may now add two more, namely, Nemesia meridionalis, with its branched double-door nest, and N. Eleanora the builder of the unbranched double-door nest, thus making twelve in all.

Three of the twelve, however, Atypus piceus, A. Blackwallii, and Nemesia cellicola,^[3] do not appear to build true trap-doors, but only a simple silk tube without any covering at the mouth.

The following tabular view will show to which of the four types of trap-door nest those of the remaining nine spiders belong, and their geographical distribution:—

1. In his monograph of Territelariæ quoted above.
2. I use this term in its widest sense, making it even include Morocco. A list of the species known to inhabit this region will be found in Appendix C.
3. See Appendix A, p. 141.