Gigi Norton, age 10, of San Bernardino, California, for her question:
What is a trap door snider?
Perhaps there is a trap door in the ceiling of your home leading to the roof or the attic. The handy gadget is a flat hole leading from one level to the next and covered with a neatly fitting hinged door. The idea was invented by certain spiders millions of years before people made houses.
About 30,00 different spiders have been listed and all of them can spin gossamer threads of silk. All of them dine on bugs and beetles and help to keep down the pesky insect population. The big wolf spider chases his victims on long, hairy legs. Many others also are hunters. And many spiders are expert trappers. The cobweb in the attic and the gauzy round web in the garden are spider snares for trapping insects. Perhaps the most amazing trapper of them all in the trap door spider.
These spiders live in many parts of the country but we are most likely to find one in the Southwest. Look for this hungry housewife on the ground outdoors in a place where bugs and beetles scuttle to and fro. Even if she is there, you may look all day and not see her. And you can stare right at her front door and mistake it for a tiny patch of dirt. But if you are very lucky, you will see her tiny trap door lifted. Out peps her :head and a few of her eight long legs. If a bug happens to scuttle by, the spider grabs him. She hauls him downstairs for dinner, closing the door behind her.
The amazing spider is a stay at home who lives most of her life in the ground. Her home is a burrow six inches deep and three quarters of an inch wide. She dug it herself and neatly lined it with webbing of silken threads. The tpp is smoothly beveled or slanted. She made a lid with sloping sides to fit perfectly into the hole. It is a solid little door made from crumbs of dirt matted together with silken threads. The top of the trap door is covered with grits and grains of dirt so that it looks just like the ground around it.
Spiders are the enemies of bugs and beetles and other small creatures. But the spiders themselves have enemies. They are eaten by birds and frogs, toads and lizards. The fat trap door spider is hunted by parasitic wasps. She hides behind her hinged door, watching and waiting to grab her victims as they pass by. But that wonderful little door also protects her from her spider eating foes. However, if she fails to shut it fast enough, a wasp or some other enemy may dash down the burrow and grab her.
The trap door spider lays her eggs and brings up her batch of babies down inside the cozy burrow. This is another reason why she is careful to keep her door closed. She has young ones to protect. The young spiders stay in the burrow until they are perhaps eight months old. Then they leave and each one goes off to build a home and most likely to live there for the rest of her life. The new home may be small and a bit ragged. But by the time a spider is fully grown, it has been enlarged and improved to look just like the trap door home that Mama built.