Abstract
YOUR correspondent, Mr. Frank Rowbotham, in his letter on the “Habits of Spiders” (vol. xxvi. p. 386), gives it as his opinion that a spider shakes the web from a desire “to effect concealment when it feels danger is near.” I am inclined to think it does so from a feeling of anger. During a long residence in the tropics, I often amused myself irritating spiders and watching their conduct. I noticed that they generally seized the web and shook it up and down in the manner described by your correspondent, but some of the spiders were of so great a size as to render concealment by such a man uvre quite hopeless, and I attributed their behaviour to other motives. They appeared to me more to resemble angry monkeys than anything else. I have not unfrequently seen the latter when annoyed jumping up and down on all fours with their tails erect in the air, or if confined in a cage seize the bars bp their hands and feet and shake them as the spiders did their webs.
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C., W. Habits of Spiders. Nature 26, 454 (1882). https://doi.org/10.1038/026454a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/026454a0
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