User:Patrick0Moran/Sandbox2
A Wolf spider is a member of the group of spiders whose scientific name is the Lycosidae. Lycos means "wolf" in Latin. These spiders get their name from the way they hunt, which the people who named them thought was like the way wolves hunt. However, wolves hunt in packs but spiders are solitary animals. Their manner of hunting is more like that of solitary cats such as the cheetahs. [1] They generally wait for their prey to wander close by, and then they rush in to kill it. [2]
The wolf spiders belong to a large group. The smallest of them are so small that many people never notice them. The largest of them are around 1.5 inches (38 mm) in body length. The smallest of them are less than 0.04 inches (1 mm) in body length.[3] Some of them spend all of their lives above ground (taking the best shelter they can find), some dig burrows but come out of the burrows to wander about and hunt, and some spend almost all of their lives in their burrows waiting for passing insects.
One kind of wolf spider gives us the name that is now used in English for an entirely different kind of spider. This wolf spider has the scientific name Hogna tarantula because this is a spider that is found around Taranto, a city in Italy. People there believed that if a human were bitten by one of these wolf spiders, then he or she would surely die unless made to do a wild dance. Actually, Hogna tarantula does not give bites that need medical help. Any deaths from spiders in the area of Taranto probably came from the local Widow spider.[4]
As you can see from the above photograph, mother wolf spiders carry their baby spiders around on their backs. They protect the babies for a few days, and then the babies disperse.
.jpg)
After a female wolf spider mates, she creates a clear space on the ground, lays down a rough sheet of silk, and on top of that sheet she makes a silken cup in spinneretes[5] until the babies begin to hatch. She then opens the silk ball and lets the baby spiders emerge. They all run up her legs and cover the top part of her body.[6] There may be more than one hundred baby spiders on her back.[7]
- ↑ John Crompton, The Life of Spiders, page 55.)
- ↑ Rainer F. Foelix, Biology of Spiders, p.9.
- ↑ http://www.australasian-arachnology.org/arachnology/araneae/lycosidae/
- ↑ Rainer F. Foelix, Biology of Spiders, p. 8.
- ↑ Rainer F. Foelix, Biology of Spiders, p. 9.
- ↑ John Crompton, Life of the Spiders, pp.67-75.
- ↑ Rainer F. Foelix, Biology of Spiders, p.9.